About twenty minutes later, we found the second [Juvenile Yeti Crab] and the second pump. There was a different, but equally nasty trap in front of the mirrored door. This crab used Earth attacks instead of Air ones, but was otherwise identical to the first. We overwhelmed it with sheer force, cracking its armor and bringing it to bay.
"Alright... second miniboss down, second pump go. I'm not convinced it's going to be as easy as switching it on and heading in to fight Karkinos, though." Angel hesitated a moment, looking back at us. Lulu was now in vest form, formed around my torso like a gooey lifejacket. She'd eaten some crab as well, though she hadn't been able to absorb any attacks from it.
"It'll be fine. Let's grab some sausage and go have our crawfish boil." I lashed my tail impatiently.
Angel grimaced uncertainly as she turned back, and pushed the lever that started the pump. Deep under our feet, I heard a different sort of rumble than before. The entire cistern began to shake.
"Hooo boy." I splayed my limbs out for balance as the floor bucked, freezing as a new, unpleasant sound reached my ears over the intense vibrations. Water. Tons and tons of water.
Angel’s mouth twitched wryly to one side. “Pump’s active.”
“Sure is.” The sound was making me nervous. “So… when does the crab battle kick off? I’m starting to feel itchy.”
"Not so fast. We still have to go back down to the ground floor and activate the sluice gates. And then run, a lot." Angel signed as she turned back.
"Up down, up down... you'd think I was a fucking mule." I grumbled as she paused to take a drink and a bite to eat. "I ever mention that I hate dungeon crawls?"
"Why? Solving puzzles too hard for that smooth brain of yours?" Angel smirked.
"Excuse me, but my brain is so wrinkled. Unbelievably wrinkled. Wrinklier than Margaret Thatcher’s… you know, never mind. I just made myself puke in my mouth a little." Despite the bitching, I didn't try and stop her as she remounted. Angel's weight was inconsequential compared to my strength at Level 20. "Anyway. I might be a himbo, but I know this place is designed to wear your Legions out."
"Once we're over on the boss access platform, we can take a little nappy-nap." Angel leaned out so I could see her face and hands.
"I'll give you a little nappy-nap, right in the kisser." Snorting and rumbling, I paced toward the door. "You better thank me when you're not impaled by spears on the way out of here."
"All jokes aside, Noodles, I'm grateful for your help. between the three of us, we've progressed further through this game than I ever could have alone." She smiled wistfully, then leaned back to concentrate on riding.
I thought on that as I loped back down to the Hot Zone - and could have sworn the lava was higher than it was before, blooping and plopping barely twenty feet below the edge of the rail-less ramp. Blistering heat beat up against my skin, barely relieved once we went inside the door to the gyro room. "Question: Are we sure those pipes we just activated are piping JUST water?"
"Good question," Angel fingerspelled back. She didn't elaborate.
The engine room now felt alive - and extremely hot. We could hear and feel the surge of water behind the sluice gates, barely contained. When we turned the Big Red Wheel, all that water was going to come thundering out - and would hopefully cool everything down.
"How about you ladies just... stay where you are," I thought to Lulu and Angel both as I padded over to the wheel. "You know. Just in case we have to run away from a lot of water really fast."
"Suits me." Angel took her gun off her shoulder, holding it warily. "Something doesn't-"
She hadn't even started signing the next word when a nasty stench blew to my nostrils - the mingled odour of acid and rotten flesh. It was barely enough warning for me to leap back out of the way as a yellowish slime slopped out from between the pipes overhead. splattering over the wheel, railing and floor. Whatever it touched hissed and bubbled - and was then engulfed, as the drops turned to a waterfall of rotten, bone-studded ooze. Two tonnes of it, at least, that amalgamated into a slime the size of a dumptruck. A slime that looked - and smelled - like it was full of pockets of pus and rot, along with the bones of many, many humans. They were half dissolved into its mass. Old weapons and scraps of armor were visible through its cloudy mass. There was even what looked like a damn rocket launcher in there, trapped in the heart of the ooze.
"Ah. So that’s why this room smelled like corpses." The spines along my head and neck flattened as I backpedaled, gagging from the stench. Ahead of us, the [Necrotic Bone Slime] twisted, its sheer weight wrenching the red sluice-gate wheel around - and then breaking it off. The gates shuddered open half-way, and all other sound drowned by the sudden roar of water bursting out into the canal. "Lulu! Analyze this thing, now!"
This thing was like Lulu’s giant crackhead uncle. A whip-like pseudopod lashed at us; I barely avoided it, and instead of crashing into me, it smashed into the floor barely a foot from Angel's boot. The liquid limb was studded with sharp pieces of bone that shattered on the tiles.
"EEE!" Lulu squeaked as she tightened around me in terror - but a pulse of energy radiated from her, and after a moment, I got some data:
Necrotic Bone Slime
HP: 10000/10000
Spirit/Blood/Water Lesser Daeva
Special Abilities: Absorb, Engulf, Necrotize
Untameable
We'd had the Air and Earth mini-bosses - this was the number two big-boy boss before Karkinos. But now at least I knew it had weaknesses. Before Lulu had time to hesitate, I plugged my tentacles into her and triggered Soul Drain. I selected Electroshock, and as time sped up again, turned back to the Bone Slime and roared in challenge.
"Noodles, wait!" Angel voiced aloud - but not quite fast enough, as my dumb ass charged at the slime, tentacles open and already charging with electricity. I plugged it with all four as a powerful electromagnetic field surged around me, then blasted into the slime.
And Angel.
The slime took the bulk of the damage, rearing back and spasming from the triple super-effective hit. Lulu wasn't affected by my attack because she was collared to me - but Angel wasn't bound to us, and she took a shock from my body. Lulu squealed in alarm as the human jerked, her rifle clattering to the floor, then swayed and went limp.
[You have done 1,408 damage to Bone Slime. 3x elemental damage!]
[You deal 313 damage to Angel. HP: 249/562 ]
The realization made me freeze for just a second - a second too long, as slime lashed out and slammed into me. The blow sent me careening across the floor: I twisted desperately to protect my rider, fucking my own leg in the process.
"Goddammit! Lulu, get her to safety!" Panting, I retreated as far from the enraged slime as I could.
"Ooo!" Terrified and but as well-trained as only a nurse could be, Lulu sucked off my body, encapsulating Angel and taking her to the floor. She pulled the moaning, semi-conscious woman over to a corner as I set myself between them and the boss. Two long 'arms' darted toward me, and I braced myself as one wrapped around the base of a tentacle and the other caught and stuck to my chest. They began to haul me in like a fish toward the Bone Slime's mass, which gaped open to receive me like a giant, dripping mouth.
And there, at the heart, I spotted it: the slime's core. It was a yellowish, throbbing blob, like a diseased heart anchored by tendons at the deepest point of the cloudy goop. It was protected by a woven cage of bones. But not well enough.
I stopped fighting the Bone Slime's strength and let it reel me in - until I was just about to pulled inside of it. There, I boosted myself with Psychostimulant, then dug my hind claws into the ground and struck forward with two tentacles, plunging them deep inside the monster's body, straight at its heart. The slime writhed as they hit - and snapped shut around them. A slow-building, hot pain danced through my nerves as it began to try and digest the parts of me trapped inside. I snapped my jaws, locking my fangs together as I concentrated - and used Electroshock a second time, this time directing the strike right into its core.
[Critical hit: x2 Damage. X3 elemental damage. You deal a mortal blow. 5,634 damage. HP: 2,958/10,000]
The slime collapsed and spat me out, writhing in agony. My tentacles came free with a hiss, the acid on their surface smoking. Patches of raw, blueish flesh were visible, and I winced as the cold air hit them and stung - but only for a moment before I threw myself back into the fray. I glimpsed Lulu behind me, shielding Angel as she stirred weakly on the floor.
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I charged in before the slime could completely regroup itself. The ooze sensed me coming, and reared up like a tidal wall. I wasn't stupid enough to run straight into it. I veered to the side, searching for the sick yellow core inside. The slime twisted as I coursed around it, shifting and rearranging itself so that sharp pieces of bone projected from it like a spike wall - spikes it shot at me like harpoons. I vaulted the railing, dancing along it as it collapsed toward the thundering, boiling river below, then whirled and leaped with all eight limbs. Before I landed on the slime, I caught the pipes above with two tentacles, groaning as the raw, bleeding flesh stretched and strained, and lanced the others down. Two could play the harpoon game.
[You deal 120 damage.]
Without an electrical charge, piercing Body-type attacks did barely anything - but pain wasn't the goal. What I wanted was exactly what the slime did - it shot forward with its pseudopods to grab me, its body splitting open to engulf me. I gagged as the stench washed over me, the pipes groaning and creaking as I hung onto them. I kicked at the pseudopods, raking them as the slime yearned toward me, spitting wider and wider until... THERE!
My two less-injured tentacles plunged down into the sick, twitching core, the spikes at the ends ejecting through the pulsing fleshy walls - and delivered a payload of pure electricity.
[You deal a mortal blow.]
The Bone Slime convulsed in a silent scream. The pseudopods faltered - then slopped away as the creature collapsed like a dead jellyfish, twitching as it flopped to the floor and dissolved.
[You have defeated Necrotic Bone Slime. You gain 455 EXP. Lulu gains 321 exp.]
[You have gained Key Items. Check your inventory for details.]
[You have five new Patrons. You have your first Silver rank Patron: Yosano Akiko.]
[The water is rising. We suggest you run.]
The last notification took me by surprise - but it was the screech of metal being torn apart that made me jump. The canal beneath us was overfilling, and the water that was coming up over the ledge was hot. Too hot. I bit back a grunt of pain as boiling water splashed one of the raw patches of acid-damaged flesh.
"Ooo! Eee!" Lulu scooped Angel up to hold her out of the shallow current now sweeping across the ground, gesturing wildly with her little slime arms.
"Yeah. Let's get the fuck out of here." The water WAS rising - fast. My feet were burning as I splashed over. Lulu loaded us onto my back herself, assisted by the puds. All four tentacles felt burned and scoured, weeping blue blood and flinching whenever they touched fabric or water. I bit down on the pain and broke into a limping run for the door, speeding as one, then two pipes burst and crumbled overhead.
We tore out into a cloud of dense steam, thick as cream and so hot my lungs squeezed in protest. Water gushed into the lava below, causing it to crackle and groan. The torrent was superheating, most of it barely even reaching the molten rock before it vaporized, but there was so much of it that it was starting to fill the cistern. I had SOME heat resistance, but fuck... a little of it splashed over my feet as I started up the ramp, and it felt like more acid eating into my toes.
"Eee! Eeee!" Lulu squeaked in alarm as the door we'd just exited blew out behind us, thrown off its hinges by the geyser-like blast of water that rushed from it and swirled up the ramp behind us.
"I know! I'm running as fast as I can!" Which was not very, given I was burned and at one-third of my HP and carrying about eight hundred and fifty pounds. Wait: eight-fifty? What the fuck was I carrying? Angel accounted for about a hundred and forty of that; Lulu another two hundred, the junk turret another two fifty. Panting, struggling up the ramp, I opened my Inventory to see what the fuck was weighing us down. There were three new items: the Daeva Shrine key, which weighed a mere 0.1lb... and a brand new shiny [Harpoon Cannon] along with four [harpoon static lines], which altogether weighed about three hundred.
"Fucking FUCK." I couldn’t offload the weight. That thing was important - a 'Key Item', according to Chorus. As heavy as it was, we probably needed it to advance through the dungeon, and maybe even the entire game. And I was pretty sure I knew where we needed to use it first.
I sprinted up the ramp, tongue lolling. Forced myself to deal with the pain. I was too aware of how much Angel had to be in, all too aware of how we’d cook to death if the water nipping at my heels caught up with us. My tail was getting steamed by the time I staggered up the last and steepest part of the ramp to the top of the cistern, and looked back to see a froth of boiling water rise… then wash and ebb like the tide against the tides. The seams in the walls that Angel had spotted before weren’t water spouts. They were drains, like the drains in the side of a swimming pool, and they kept the water from reaching us.
“God damn,” I thought, flumping to the floor. “Lulu, treat yourself first. Then can you get Angel one of the human healing potions?”
Potions were one of the few objects Legions were allowed to use. Guess it counted as food, or some other kind of consumable. Lulu cooed reassuringly to Angel as she piped bright green fluid into her mouth. The girl coughed and groaned.
“Look… y’know, I’m real sorry about what just happened,” I thought to her. “I didn’t even fucking think. Just started blasting.”
“No shit,” she signed back.
I winced and lay down to rest. “I’m not in good shape either. Mind dosing me up too?”
“Ooh hu!”
Once the last of our wounds were closed, we got to figuring out the harpoon cannon. Sweating, her lips pressed together in a thin, determined line, Angel set up the tripod and figured out how to load the thing while Lulu and I stood by and watched.
"Weird to think one of the Hell Pigs managed to do all this," she voiced, wrestling with the cable winch.
“Let’s be real. Clive probably claimed Kaya for himself,” I said. “He’s the smartest of the Pigs I’ve met so far. Ruthless, too. Got the feeling he has a military background, which makes me wonder why he’s not in the Elites.”
"Probably didn’t suck the right cock before he was sent here.” Angel sighed. “I guess I just assumed they were all dumb as hell, which isn’t smart of me to do. You don't have to be a genius to get through this place, but it's a lot of work. And it means being good enough at shooting to hit THAT."
She pointed over the frothing sea of boiling water to a small palm-sized circle set into the wall right across from us. It somehow looked softer than the surrounding wall, and it had a plus sign embossed on it - a target.
"Yeah. I have a feeling our dear old friend Clive is a lot more competent than he seems," I replied to her and Lulu both, watching Angel as she scoped down the harpoon and clasped the grips to either side of the barrel. "He mentioned something about having family on the outside when he was trying to woo me into working with him.”
“Who knows? Everyone here lies.” Angel’s expression turned briefly stormy.
“I dunno. We seem to have a pretty good dynamic going here.”
Angel turned to look at me over her shoulder. She looked like she was about to sign something, but then shook her head and turned back to the harpoon.
“Ooo?” Lulu ‘looked’ between the two of us.
“Nothing, kid. Don’t worry about it.” I sat down like a cat, neatly folding my tail across my front paws. “Just a bit of awkward tension between adults.”
“Ooooo.” Lulu bobbled thoughtfully.
We fell silent as Angel made some kind of adjustment to the cannon and went still, lining up the shot. For a moment, she was nothing but the Huntress, her expression a neutral, focused mask... and then there was a CHOONK and a puff of smoke. The harpoon sailed across the divide and nailed the target right dead center. The barbed head of the harpoon anchored into it. We had a static line.
"Yes!" Angel's face lit up as she reeled the line taut, then stepped back and gave a little fist pump.
"Did I ever mention that you're kind of incredible?" I folded my tail around my front feet.
"Once or twice. Thanks." Angel blushed, cleared her throat, then looked over toward the still-locked door. "Now we just have to get over there."
I eyed the hot water with trepidation. "Think we can pick this cannon up at the other end? Got a feeling we'll need it for the boss fight. I’d "
"Don't see why not," Angel signed. "Physics don't always work the same way here. But we might have to leave the junk turret behind… you’re overburdened with both, and I’m not sure which one I’d prefer more."
“Good point. We have no idea what’s through that door.” But my intuition was screaming at me, yelling that we needed the harpoon if we were to be successful. “Hate to say it, but… I think we should leave the turret.”
“Ugh.” Angel sighed. “Well… at least I was able to analyze the one we have. I have the schema to build more if we need them, but it takes iron and oil.”
“Don’t worry about it for now. We have patrons, and if we pull this shit off, I think we’ll be drowning in iron by the time Karkinos is dead.” I dumped the turret out of my inventory onto the ground. “Lulu, can you zipline yourself and Angel across? I’ll follow up.”
"Uuuhuu!" Lulu vibrated with excitement, hopping over to the start of the static line. She slithered up the cannon to the taut cable, and began to Tarzan around on it.
Angel scowled. "I have arms. I can get across myself."
"Arms that we need to be in tip-top condition so you can shoot straight. So, all aboard the Slime Express." I went over to the cannon, tail lashing. I'd placed it down so that Angel could use it, and it still belonged to me, according to the game. I could pick it up again. "And by that, I mean you."
Angel shot a glance at the churning, steaming water, sighed, and strode over to where Lulu beckoned.
"Ooo!" Lulu mimed pumping a fist. The Limne anchored herself along the line, then wrapped a pair of 'arms' around Angel's slender waist, hauling her up like a log. Angel's expression flattened to one of mild disbelief and resignation as Lulu trundled across the line, humming cheerfully and tunelessly to herself.
"Choo choooo!" I chortled to myself. Even though Angel couldn't hear me, somehow, she knew. She flipped me the bird from across the water.
Watching Lulu carry Angel over was funny and all, but there was a deep, tight feeling in my gut. It only relented when I saw Angel's feet touch the ground on the other side. When Lulu sloughed off, plopped on the ground and reformed, that was my cue. The heat of the water beat against my skin as I used my many limbs to anchor myself to the line. The wire bowed under my weight, and as I scuttled along it underneath, my back got very close to the surface about halfway across. HP began to trickle away, one point at a time.
"Eeep!" Lulu squeaked, bouncing up and down in agitation.
"It's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine." My back was baking, but my mind was cool and composed as I began to climb back up from the mid-point. A few more minutes, and I was able to hook onto the platform with a tentacle, then pull myself along another ten feet to solid ground. Once I touched down, I flipped my tentacles along my back and struck a heroic pose. “And there you have it. M.T Noodles the 4th, un-boiled and victorious. As usual.”
"Modest as usual, too." Angel rolled her eyes, and turned to unlock the boss door. But she was smiling.
"Modest-T Noodles. You got it." I turned to try and find a spot to pick up the Harpoon Cannon. My HUD flashed red and made a BLART sound several times before I found the correct anchor point, and sucked the weapon back into my inventory, staggering as my weight suddenly went from 15% to over 50%.
"Don't get too cocky. Karkinos is next." Angel fitted the key and turned it. Ancient gears squealed somewhere, then rumbled as the doors slid open to reveal... "AUUGH!"
Heat washed over us like a furnace. Heat bad enough that it made the cistern feel like a pleasantly warm spa. Beyond the doors was a raw hot-spring cavern hotter than a sauna. Pools of muddy water blooped and quivered. The limestone walls dripped and hissed with condensation.
"I'm starting to sense a theme," I remarked, padding in past Angel as she got her water flask and took a swig. "What is this? Revenge for all the times we boiled crabs alive, or something?"
"Something like that." Angel hadn't even passed through the threshold, and she looked miserable. "This is going to be a slog."
"Yup. Sure is." But as I paced ahead of her, I took a glance at our viewer count. It was nothing short of insane. "But you girls and me, we're gonna make it look GOOD."