Before the monster could decapitate me, Croc came roaring out of the master suite and pulled an epic Uno Reverse, decapitating it first.
One moment I was watching the yawning jaws of inevitable and certain death approach, and the next the creature’s whole head disappeared down the maw of an even more dangerous predator: a rubbery blue dog, the size of a bear.
The monster’s HP immediately hit zero and its oppressive mental spell was abruptly broken. I gasped, shaking my head to clear away the haze, and took a few tentative steps backward. The length of gray rope went slack and fell into a disorderly pile on the floor in front of me and suddenly I could think again. The Lodger had been inside my head, but now its presence was gone. Banished.
“Holy shit that was close,” I said, rubbing a trembling hand against my throat. Even though the creature was only level 13, I got the sense that it had come very close to killing me. If not for Croc, my skull would probably be lining that things gullet at this very moment.
“You’ve got to be more careful, Dan,” Croc admonished sternly, letting the rest of the creature’s body fall to the floor with a wet thump. “And you’ve really got to do something about that low Grit score, especially if you have any hope of taking a run at the Sales Sirens or the Franchisor.” The dog looked at me with serious, googly eyes. “Those things are all about the mind games, Dan, and I might not always be close enough to pull your bacon out of the fire.”
I grunted and rubbed a hand across my throat once more.
I could almost feel the rough strands of the noose against my skin. Croc was right. That had been too close. It was a humbling experience and a firm reminder that no one was invincible. That everything had a weakness, if you lived long enough to find it. This wasn’t the first time my low Grit score had nearly cost me my life, but I’d work to make sure it was the last.
“Thanks, Croc. You’re a good boy.”
“Ah, thanks, Dan! Does that mean we can have Froyo?” the mimic asked, waggling its tail hopefully.
“As much as you want,” I agreed with a nod. “Let me just get what we came for.”
I dropped down to one knee beside the dead Dweller and looted its core, recovering an Uncommon Shard and an intriguing Uncommon-grade Relic, forebodingly called Bleak Outlook. When activated, the Relic caused its victim to develop—I shit you not—severe season depression, capable of temporarily immobilizing the target for a short while and making them too depressed to fight back. The Relic itself was an eight-by-ten painting of a bleak winter scene, bordered by an expensive golden frame.
Quiet fitting, all things considered.
It wasn’t as good as Bad Trip—the spell was too expensive, the cooldown too long, the effect not quite as powerful—but it was a close second. Definitely worth hanging onto for later.
I tucked the Relic away, then got to work, quickly enlarging my minimap until it dominated my field of view. I used one shaky finger to trace the desired area before finally activating my Blanket Fort ability.
You’ve selected 720 square feet of eligible Progenerated Material Resource Space. Would you like to use Corvo’s Blanket Fort to convert the selected material into a Personal Superspace Dwelling? You will have 39,984 available square feet remaining at your current Variant Assimilation Level. Proceed Yes/No?
Researcher’s Codex Note: Doing so will amputate the selected material from its current Spatial Location, and transfer it to an extradimensional Superspace pocket, accessible only through a designated Doorway Anchor. Additional sequestered Progenerated Material can be grafted onto the current space at any time. For a full list of Blanket Fort features and options, please see the Blanket Fort DYI Operations Manual, available after claiming your first section of the Backrooms.
Before accepting, I took a moment to plant a Doorway Anchor on a hotel room across the hall from the one I was preparing to annex, then I made sure Jakob and Croc had their arms, legs, and tentacles safely inside the ride. Wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally lose a limb in the process, even if Croc could regrow missing appendages. Once everything was squared away to my satisfaction, I braced myself and hit yes.
The room rattled and rumbled, the mirrors vibrating violently against the wall for a beat. Thankfully the sensation didn’t last long. When the tremors finally subsided and died completely, I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers and opened the door. I let out a sigh of relief. The entryway door to what was formerly room 5519 no longer let out into the hallway, but instead connected to the storage room, which was filled with camp cots, private tents, and a handful of customers who were looking at me like I’d just grown a dick on my forehead.
“Nothing to see here,” I said, waving them away, before slamming the door and locking the deadbolt with a large grin.
The room was a mess thanks to the scuffle with the Hotel Lodger, whose body was still sprawled out in the sitting room, but I didn’t really care. I mean, yeah, I’d have to take care of the corpse eventually, but after fifteen hours of trudging through Hotel Hell and slaughtering countless horrors, there was only one thing I want to do…
***
I found Croc and Jakob, made sure both were okay, then hustled them out of the room without an ounce of ceremony and turned toward the only thing that matter in the whole world at this exact moment: the glorious, wonderous, miraculous invention known as the shower.
I stripped out of my clothes—though, honestly, it felt more like peeling them off since they were so sticky and grimy. My jorts were so stiff they could’ve stood up on their own, and my wifebeater was just a gory mess. Even though it was a largely useless endeavor, I took a few minutes to fruitlessly dunk my clothes in the bathroom sink along with a dose of extra-strength detergent. It was a losing battle and by the time I finally gave up and called it quits, the water was still a frothy pink and my clothes were still disgusting.
At least there weren’t any visible “chunks” left behind.
I laid the clothes out, added some anti-fungal foot powder to my boots, then crawled into the luxury stand-up shower. And when I say luxury, I mean luxury with a capital L. The thing was big enough to hold a party of five and it had one of those overhead waterfall shower heads plus a full stainless steel wall panel with four separate body message jets. Hell, it even had one of those handheld attachments for getting to those hard-to-reach places.
The water pressure was strong enough to strip paint, just the way I liked it, and the shower had hot water for days. It didn’t ever seem to run out, even though I stood there for at least half an hour, getting sandblasted by water just smidge less hot than scalding. This was the first time I’d taken a real, full body shower in almost two months. Up until now, it had been washcloth bathes in a sink, or hasty Baby wipe showers in a toilet stall.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Compared to that, I was in heaven on earth.
After what felt like days, I killed the water, toweled dry, and brushed my teeth since my mouth tasted like a dirty litter box. When I glanced at myself in the enormous circular mirror mounted above the sink, I grimaced. I still looked like a giant pile of horseshit, but at least I wasn’t visibly “dirt-caked” anymore, which was a huge win in my book. My dad always said, take your victories where you can get ’em.
My clothes were still drying, so I pulled on a clean white bathrobe, which had been conveniently tucked away in the linen closet with the other towels, then shuffled out of the steamy bathroom and over to the sitting room. I was dog tired, but I wanted to sort my loot before hitting the rack for a bit of well-deserved shuteye.
Even after splitting Relics and Shards with Jakob, the day had been a huge success. I’d walked away with forty-three new Relics and fifty-seven Shards, most Common—though a few Uncommon as well. I set aside a few of the better Relics for the Store’s Inventory, pulled out the I wanted to keep for myself, then used the rest to power level a few of my equipped abilities.
Most of my core Relics—like Pressure Washer, StainSlayer Maelstrom, and Sterilization Field—were already at level 5, but some of my newer Relics were lagging behind. Fault Spike was only at level 3, so I sacrificed ten common-grade Relics to push it up to level 5, unlocking the first threshold ability in the process.
Although the Mana cost sharply increased—jumping from 5 to 10 Mana per spike cast—so the damage each earthen spike dealt also doubled from 25 to 50. Hitting the first threshold also unlocked a secondary effect, called Stone Skewer, which let me hurl a single rocky javelin composed entirely of razor-sharp obsidian, which dealt 35 points of piercing damage on contact. The added ability gave the skill considerably greater versatility, since I could now use it at range. Plus, it would be awesome against heavily armored foes like the kiosk crab, who were resistant against the slashing damage of my Pressure Washer spell.
When I got to Bad Trip, I paused and pulled out the Bleak Outlook Relic, examining the two in closer proximity.
They had an incredibly strong resonance, which wasn’t much of a surprise considering how similar their effects were. Together, they were much stronger than either one was apart, but I was truly surprised to find that when I added a third Relic into the mix the synergy went off the charts. That third item was a simple Common-Grade Relic called Tinfoil Hat, which I’d picked up more than a month ago from Barry’s Black Light Emporium on the third floor.
It wasn’t particularly powerful or even good, yet it seemed to bring out strength of the other two in fascinating ways.
Synergistic Resonance Detected!
Would you like to Forge Tinfoil Hat (Common – Level 1) and Bad Trip (Uncommon – Level 3), and Bleak Out (Uncommon – Level 1) into a new Relic?*
Yes/No?
Right below that, like a footnote tacked on at the bottom of a textbook page, was a much smaller line of text.
* Run Researcher’s Codex Compatibility Analysis - Yes/No?
Even though I was extremely excited, I wanted to do my due diligence, so I selected yes and ran the compatibility Analysis first.
Based on historic data sets and extensive Forging models, Tinfoil Hat (Common – Level 1) and Bad Trip (Uncommon – Level 3), and Bleak Outlook (Uncommon – Level 1) have an estimated 98% resonance compatibility, meaning the number of possible Relic Iterations is Extremely Low. The most probably outcome is Existential Dread (Rare – Fully Tempered), or a closely adjacent derivative. Would you like to view additional report records for the Existential Dread ability? Yes/No?
I took a quick look at the additional report and was pleased with what I saw, even though the upgraded Relic was still only Rare-grade.
Existential Dread
Rare Relic – Level 1
Range: Single or Multi-Target, Line of Sight
Cost: 25 Mana
Cooldown: 30 Seconds
They say when you stare too long into the void, sometimes the void stares back. And now, thanks to the Variant Research Division, you too can harness the power of the Void! Unleash the harrowing vastness of the cosmos upon your foes, casting them into a downward spiral of their own existential insignificance. Force your foes to confront the fathomless abyss within their soul, paralyzing them with the overwhelming realization of their own fleeting existence in an otherwise indifferent universe.
Existential Dread can be cast simultaneously against up to five enemies within line of sight—though each additional target reduces the overall efficiency of the spell by one fifth. Effected targets are completely immobilized for between 15 and 30 seconds as they grapple with debilitating thoughts of their own mortality. During this period, the afflicted individual is rendered incapable of action, completely frozen in a state of terrifying introspection.
Those effected by External Dread also have an additional 20% chance of suffering from a Nihilistic Breakdown, causing them to fly into a fit of futile rage and attack other hostile foes in range. Existential Dread is only effective against sentient beings capable of self-awareness.
This Relic Enables Mana Use.
I burst out laughing as I finished reading through the skill description. Holy shit, this place sure had a fucked-up sense of humor. And the fact that I found it funny made it even worse somehow. I mean, what did that say about me?
Despite the off-color skill description, I had to admit the Relic was good. Better than Bad Trip, which had a much worse chance of immobilizing enemy targets—not to mention, it only worked if the enemy in question had a lower Perception Score than I did. This spell had guaranteed stopping power, and the secondary Nihilistic Breakdown was a helluva nice bonus.
I only had to consider it for another minute or two, before finally forging the three Relics into one. And since I was already upgrading things, I decided to burn another twenty Relics and push it right up to level five, which added another threshold effect:
All additional psionic or psychic attacks are 50% more effective during the duration of the spell effect.
Not too shabby at all.
With that done, I used the remainder of my excess Relics to nudge Mental Micromanagement up to Level 2. The only obvious effect was that I could now lift two objects with my mind at the same time, though I wasn’t all that keen to try it.
Of all my spells, that one was the most difficult and the most dangerous to use.
The first time I’d equipped Mental Micromanagement, I’d spontaneously started bleeding from my eyes, ears, and nose all at once. Thanks to constant practice, I could now send my demolition screwdriver careening through the air like an artillery round with the same amount of effort it took to toss a baseball, but it had taken a lot of work to get there. In a lot of ways, that strand of telekinetic power felt like a new hand that I’d grown rather comfortable with over the past few days.
I had a feeling that adding a second item to the mix would be like starting all over again.
The moment I upgraded the Relic, my head immediately began to throb, and I felt something stretch and strain inside my chest. Gritting my teeth in pain, I extended two wispy, invisible strands of telekinetic energy, and hoisted my screwdriver into the air with one, and a small throw pillow with the other. I couldn’t hold both for long, and even doing that much felt like dragging a semi up the side of Mount Everest with my teeth. Both objects fell to the ground after only a few seconds and a renewed wave of exhaustion rolled through me like the incoming tide.
Even though a part of me wanted to get back out there and find that stupid washing machine, my body simply refused to cooperate. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.
Instead, I pulled myself from the chair with a heavy groan and beelined for the cushy king-sized mattress in the adject master suite. I flopped down, face first with a sigh of sweet relief, not even bothering to remove the fluffy bathrobe. The sheets were silky soft and nicer than anything I’d ever slept in back home. The bed itself embraced me like a cloud.
I’d barely managed to get under the sheets before I was snoring like a freight train rumbling through the night.