If there was any silver lining to this, it was that this whole debacle probably wouldn't accelerate their life or negatively affect their relationships to Borant and its shows. Probably. Hopefully. Actually, make that a maybe. With how little the human race meant to these folks, they might screw over the whole party for good measure even if no offence was taken.

Well, too late to change that now, so they just had to wait for the shit throwing competition to end and see what awaited them.

Darryl looked over at Thomas and looked at his wrist. Thomas peeled back his sleeve and checked his watch. Darryl would've done it himself, but he took his off when it hadn't fit comfortably underneath his old kite shield. It was in his inventory now, and thus beyond his reach.

“It's been 17 minutes.” Thomas whispered to him.

Over a quarter hour of shit talking? There were no doubt a million better ways to make a first impression on the people watching the dungeon crawl, but they hadn't gotten a chance to do that. Instead, it seemed like discarding any refinement was the Maestro's goal from the beginning, or at least one possible outcome he desired.

The orc had certainly lured it out of them, and was gleefully trading barbs with their rasher two members. Worse, he was winning. Ben was overeager and easily baited into traps or overreaching his arguments, and when he didn't fumble then the Maestro could intimidate him to back down. Angry or not, Ben hadn't forgotten that this guy could likely decide to kill them on a whim, and so he flinched when the Maestro suggested as much.

Elise was a better hand at it, wielding scathing retorts as she knew how and when to break the Maestro's traps and preferred topics to not give him the upper hand. She was at a massive disadvantage though, as their audience was a bunch of horned up teenagers that idolised this pigman. Even if the Maestro bludgeoned her clever jabs and sudden wits with crude retorts and depraved gestures, he still won because he played into the audience's tastes. And with her having to cross her hands in front of her chest to protect her breasts from his holographic fingers, she looked on the defensive even when she wasn't.

“And what about you, Darryl?” The Maestro said. “Let us talk with the lesser one of the group.”

“What did you say, pig?” Ben said. “Darryl is not lesser than any of us, injury or not!”

“Injuries happen, and will soon be healed.” The Maestro said. “Sure, it was hella embarrassing that he got himself maimed and almost killed in such a simple situation, but...”

“No actually, there is no but.” The Maestro said after a moment of pause and pretend contemplation. “The idiot stabbed a momentum-absorbing field once and saw that it didn't give, so he just stopped trying to break through to instead make a last stand!”

“You wouldn't have gotten yourself killed, and in fact could've killed those Krutnik easily, if you would've just slowly pushed yourself through the wall before they came and then stabbed at them while they were slowed themselves!” The Maestro said, turning to Darryl and sauntering over. “So much for being the one with the highest wisdom score of the group, or perhaps the earthlings just have very low wisdom to begin with!”

The audience laughed.

“What, no reply? Pig got your tongue?” The Maestro said, holding his hand cupped behind his ear and pretending to listen for Darryl's response real closely in a mocking fashion that the audience approved of.

“Why would we bother answering when doing so would only lower us to the likes of you?” Thomas said, somehow managing to make the whole sentence a weary sigh without sighing. “Darryl is being the wisest amongst us by ignoring you. Like we all should.”

“Oh, the magic man finally says something?” Maestro said, his vicious smile just as undaunted as it had been after the many insults and jabs of the other two. “Hey magic man, why don't you show us a magic trick? Or have we stripped you of everything but your boring words when we took you out of the dungeon?”

Thomas sighed, this time to buy some time to think and thus taking a bit longer with it than he could properly play off. “Very well. Here's a magic trick, it's called 'Your show is a cheap joke.'”

He took off his watch and placed it on thin air, where it continued to float. That actually silenced the Maestro for a moment, and Elise immediately burst out in mocking laughter to make it worse.

Ah, that was right. The Maestro's guest table was a large crescent moon, or rather a big toothy smile. They took up the left side of it, from the audience's perspective, and Thomas sat all the way at the end where the smile ran thin before it ended in a sharp point.

The table in their dinky little ship holo wasn't shaped like that, though. It was just a regular square table that granted Thomas just as much length as it did Ben. Where Ben could likely phase through a few parts of the smiling table, there was a big stretch of real table that didn't exist in the show.

And thus, Thomas could make his watch float on thin air.

“Oh well, look at that. The two kids aren't the only ones with some life in them!” The Maestro said, trying to undo the jab by pretending he didn't care and it didn't matter or that it was his idea to begin with. A common tactic of his, Darryl noted. “I've heard you Earthlings were fond of a joke to make small coins appear from behind someone's ear, so I'm honestly surprised you've got more magic tricks than that.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“If you'd like, I can show you the magic trick where we saw someone in half.” Elise said. “I haven't mastered the whole miraculously putting the two halves back together yet, but if you volunteer I'd say that the current version is an improvement.”

“And as much as I'd like to see that, I think my piglets want us to continue to the next segment. Amusing as this has been, I assure you that the next part will be all the better.” The Maestro said. “Hey piglets, how about we tell our guests what they're here for?”

“Death Watch! Death Watch!” The crowd screamed.

“That's right. We've gotten to the fun part.” The Maestro said as a screen appeared again. “You've already seen some of the creature before when we showed you these guys' highlights, and here's its origin.”

The screen once again showed an edited fight between them and the shaman lamb with the slow parts cut out, but this time the scene lingered after combat and showed a few of their achievements. And the Big Bad Woolf appearing.

“As you can see, these guys got themselves a Borough Boss not contained in a single room! Which they then promptly ran away from and avoided like the plague!” The Maestro said. “I know that Borant doesn't want me to say these kind of things, but fuck them. That Woolf probably appeared to quarantine the Krutnik wave rather than for whatever reason they gave us here. They do tend to cut corners when a bug in their self-sustaining system screws them over like that.”

“But who cares about the why and how?” He continued. “The important thing is the what. A Borough Boss roaming the halls! We can't teleport these guys into a boss room, but we've got ourselves a neat little exception to the rules this time!”

The crowds roared in approval and enthusiasm. A cold sweat took Darryl, and when he glanced at the rest he saw that they turned pale as well. Even Elise, for all her boasting and swagger to go kill it before.

“To make it fun, we are going to change up the rules a little. Normally we show our guests four scenes and ask them to predict whether the crawlers live or die, and every correct answer gets them a teleportation point. Every point allows them to teleport one person to the nearest Safe Zone while the ones are left behind to get slaughtered.” The Maestro explained. “This time, however, they are in no danger. These cowards went down the stairs prematurely, after all.”

“That's why we're going to teleport one of them to the Woolf's location no matter what. Whomever isn't teleported to the Woolf will return to the place we plucked them from, meaning they wake up on the second floor.” The Maestro said with a shit-eating grin. “It's up to them whether they want to answer everything wrong and stand a ¾ chance to survive, or if they seek to die together.”

“However, as you may have noticed there is a slight discrepancy to the game this time.” The Maestro said. “There will be four scenes for up to four points, and only three points needed for the full party to head out. So, if our crawlers get all four points, then someone else will teleport with them.”

The Maestro walked over to a small bird cage covered by a satin curtain and dramatically pulled it off. The creature inside screamed aggressively the moment it could see, and the audience was a mix of laughter, approval and ridicule.

The creature could be best described as the bastard child between a calf and an ugly white baby bird, but showing the ferocity that befitted neither. It had a calf's body except for the two front paws that were bird-like legs with stumped talons, a feathery chest and the bird's head. There were cow ears on it to make even that part look alien, and the cow's tail ended in a fan of fluffy feathers. The calf part was not up to scale, instead the hybrid creature was about the size of a house cat.

“That's right, it's a little demigriff! The pride of any orc knight and the doom of our enemies when the clarion call sounds for a cavalry charge!” The Maestro said. “Not even a week old, and enclosed in a dark space since it hatched. Which means it's oh so vicious and antisocial. Not that the calves that get mother's care are sweeties to anyone but their own family, of course!”

The Maestro looked at the party with mocking contempt. “You weren't expecting me to promise you a full-blood griffin, were you? Fly around on a steed for nobles and royalty such as myself? Nah, I'm not giving you something worth more than the four of you combined. Not that this little baby isn't as valuable as one of you guys. Hell, we've already filled in the paperwork and paid the fees to have it registered as your pet if you succeed. That's already more credits than you guys are really worth!”

The audience laughed and the Maestro let out the little demigriff into a bigger cage so that it could completely eviscerate what seemed to be a rabbit with mouse ears and a long tail.

“Something is wrong.” Thomas leaned over to whisper in Darryl's ear. “The Maestro isn't exactly smart, but he's not an idiot either. He knows that if he pointed out one of us to be the guaranteed teleport, the others might be more inclined to answer wrong and try saving themselves. Not to mention, answering wrong is as difficult as answering correctly anyhow.”

“He's not trying to kill us, you mean?” Darryl whispered back. “Could have fooled me.”

“Pass it on to the others. We're not to pick a fight or do anything stupid. For now.” Thomas whispered. “If I'm right, guessing the game will be easy anyway. Die, live, die, die.”

Darryl nodded and passed on the message. Elise hadn't gotten the chance to say much to Ben when the animal cruelty spectacle ended and the audience turned their attention back on the group, but hopefully she said enough.

“Alright, let's begin!” Maestro said, as a frozen scene of an Asian man in a business suit appeared on the screen, just looking around his shoulder at a shadow that loomed from around the corner. “Live or-”

“Die.” Elise interrupted him.

“Not wasting time, huh? And the rest of you are okay with her calling the shots like that?”

“That you try to get a discussion going to have us change our answer pretty much verifies that she chose correctly.” Thomas said, adjusting non-existing cufflinks instead of giving the Maestro the courtesy of eye contact.

“Yeah! Whatever he said.” Ben said, getting a few chuckles out of the audience. Darryl just nodded.

“Very well, let's see.” The Maestro said.

The scene played itself out, showing a woman appearing from around the corner. The man sighed in relief and lowered his weapon, clearly recognising her.

“Tell Elise and Ben not to give our answer before we see the scene. They might switch them out if we're too quick and confident about this.” Thomas whispered to Darryl instead of looking at the screen.

Darryl whispered the message forward as the man spit up blood, massive thorns piercing through his body after he turned his back to a vicious-looking cactus that had grown from a small sapling in but seconds.

The woman wept over his corpse as Elise passed the message on to Ben, who nodded to the others. Elise then turned to Darryl and whispered that she thought it a good idea to keep a pre-determined answer at the ready instead of allowing the hosts to manipulate their answers with the scene. The audience roared when a second burst of thorns shot out and killed the mourning woman, before returning their attention to the group.

“Correct!” The Maestro said. “At least one of you is not going to die alone. Let's see if your luck holds up!”