Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 35

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Snatching my purse back up from where I’d thrown it earlier, I wrenched it open, praying I’d find what I expected.

Being that my phone had ended up in there, I wagered that the rest of the stuff in the pockets of my regular clothes would have made the jump with it. I was right. I pulled out the Belgian Boxer Shorts and yanked them on over my panty hose. They caught my skirt and it bunched up ridiculously around their waistband. But there was no time to tidy my look. I dived back in to the purse for one more item.

As I pulled the golden die from the bag, Robbie’s words came back to me: Your luck is my luck.

He’d clawed his way out of a coma to point out what I should have guessed. I’d written off the Belgian Boxer Shorts as prank loot, but they were obviously a magical item that was worthless until I’d attuned to them.

Boom!

“Ohhh yeah!”

Another wall had just come down. The destruction was getting way too close. I didn’t even think about the outcome I needed. I just threw the die and hoped for the best.

But that’s not what I got.

The die rolled to a stop and came up a six. Crap. Obviously, there’d been no time for conventional attunement—no time to sit and stare at the boxer briefs for an hour. So I’d skipped right to the shortcut. But idiotically, I hadn’t fully considered the downside: miss the mark on a rapid attunement attempt and you get dinged for damage points. Thankfully, I’d only been dinged for three but that put my Life-O-Meter at . . . yup, one.

Another few seconds, the Kool-Aid Man would come busting into the room and I’d be dead. Another failed attunement attempt, I’d be dead. I knew in my bones that a successful roll was the only chance I had—the only chance Robbie had.

But despite the urgency, I couldn’t rush it. In my earlier haste, I hadn’t thought through the probabilities at work. The roll I needed had to be a seventeen. It was a stupidly high number, but it was always the threshold I’d set for rapid attunement attempts when DM’ing. You know, to make it exciting. I wished I could time travel back and kick my own ass.

But it got worse. Arcana checks are based on your Intelligence stat and bonus. The RIP stats were all fukakta by D&D standards—and, because the dynamics were glitched out the wazoo, there was no way for me to even know what my bonuses were. But the general mechanics had to be the same. And if I had to guess, intelligence and the related bonus would correlate to my Book Smarts stat, which was . . . three? Still three! It hadn’t budged from the start! No wonder my throw had failed. In that moment, I would have given every other stat point I had for one more Book Smarts point. And then I realized that I couldn’t give all of them, but I could give some of them! I started frantically swiping away points from every stat with the tell-tale red hue that indicated it had been the beneficiary of a freebie. One by one, I dropped them on Book Smarts and before long, it was the only red stat remaining, having absorbed every one of my Freebies. Again, I didn’t know what my bonuses were, or how much they increased as a given stat did, but I knew there was a chance of an increase.

There was also a chance that retro-active damage would be assessed when I reduced my Skin Thickness, which had off-set the damage taken throughout this instance. But I had to risk it. I held my breath as I relocated those two points, and was relieved to find that I didn’t keel over as that stat dropped and my Book Smarts stat jumped. It was at nine now. That didn’t seem like a world record, but it was sure as hell better than three.

Boom! The Kool-Aid Man was remodeling the next office down now. He was one wall away.

I threw the die and held my breath. It tumbled and bounced off the wall and tumbled some more and then it slowed and came to rest on . . . sixteen. Sixteen! One short of the target roll. My head started to swim as I realized I’d failed. All was lost. But then, as my Life-O-Meter ticked down to zero, I saw the die reanimate, like a capsized beetle trying to right itself. Some invisible force was nudging it past the tipping point to . . . seventeen!

It had to be the bonus! My nine points of Book Smarts had granted me +1 on Arcana checks!

Suddenly, my Life-O-Meter rebounded—and not just to one. It blew past that and climbed to ten, twenty, thirty—and kept going! The Belgian Boxer Briefs had been unlocked and they were doing their thing. I felt a surge of power as I looked down at my forearm and saw a new ability listed: Van Dammage, Level 4.

Then I knew. I wasn’t holding boxer briefs from Belgium, I was holding briefs worn by a Belgian boxer! Or, more precisely, a Belgian kickboxer. Jean-Claude Van Damme had worn nothing but black spandex shorts in his seminal masterpiece, Bloodsport. (Remember when I said there’d be more on Van Damme later? This is later.)

It all came flooding back—the endless debates with my father. I hadn’t just put Van Damme ahead of Chuck Norris. I’d had the hubris to contend that he deserved a spot in the pantheon of Johns. He had all the pre-requisites: bulging biceps, cheesy dialogue, and a unique brand of ass-kicking.

Alas, my father, being a purest, had pointed out that Van Damme had never played a character of note named John.

“But his actual name is John!” I’d rebutted. “And he’s got way bigger muscles than Bruce Willis!”

“Don’t you defame John McClane!” my father had warned.

It went on that way for a while, but in the end, there was no swaying my father on the matter. The Muscles from Brussels would never make it onto his list of action hero elites. But luckily, he’d made it onto RIP’s list of source material. Even luckier, by choosing to remain human way back when, I’d earned a +3 ability modifier, immediately jumping my new ability to level 4.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

As the Kool-Aid Man burst through the final wall between us and snarled, “Ohhhh yeah!” I felt every muscle in my body swell with action hero mojo. My Life-O-Meter topped out and every injury I’d sustained faded away in seconds. I was ready to rock.

Until I went blind.

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Yeah. I was totally, and completely blind. I know that’s redundant, but that’s how blind I was.

What the hell?

I felt the floor shake as my fruit punch-y nemesis charged toward me. A split-second later my chest and ribs were pulverized and my body was airborne. I went fully horizontal and crashed into the back wall of the office.

The Kool-Aid Man barely had time to get out an “Oh yeah!” before he barreled into me again—this time pitching me into the window frame. I felt it crack and the glass shattered, raining down on me as I hit the floor.

“Oh yeah!” The Kool-Aid Man cooed, as I felt blood start gushing out of a wound in my back. Apparently, a shard of glass had caught me on the way down to the floor. I tried to ignore that and the smaller fragments puncturing my hands as I scrambled to pull myself to my feet.

I barely had time to register that forty-four of the Life-O-Meter points I’d just recovered had been drained away again, before another handful was wiped out by a third blow. I’d gone from seventy to eighteen in less than thirty seconds.

And, also, I was still blind. Why was I blind? Was I really going to get this close and then let Robbie down because the dumb game decided to throw yet another curveball my way? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right! As a surge of rage tore its way out of me, I let fly with a primal scream that stretched on for a full five seconds.

And in that moment, the epiphany struck—a clarity of mind that can only be achieved by inadvertently channeling the greatest moment in cinematic history: the moment in Bloodsport, when Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character Frank Dux is blinded by a pinch of a powdery substance tossed into his face by the treacherous Chong Li. Van Damme’s response? A slow-motion scream of rage and confusion that will echo through the ages. After his scream, a flashback dramatically reminds the audience of all of that time Dux’s sensei serendipitously spent training him with his vision blotted out by a blind-fold. And that’s that. It’s foot in the face time for Chong Li.

Likewise, as I felt the black boxer briefs bunching up my skirt and giving me a wedgy, I knew it was foot in the face time for the Kool-Aid Man. Like most items that granted stat or ability buffs, the Belgian Boxer Briefs came with a downside. But as was usually the case, the good outweighed the bad and as my initial panic subsided, I realized that I could indeed sense the big red bastard, even if I couldn’t see him.

As he lumbered forward for the shot that would have finished me, no doubt chambering a final, triumphant “Oh yeah!” I took to the air, whirling around to my right as my legs extended into a full split just before my right heel connected with his glass carapace.

There was an ear-shattering crack as his Life-O-Meter immediately dropped to two hundred-fifty and, in a feat made possible only by Van Damme’s bizarre mixture of karate and ballet training, I touched down for less than a second before launching myself into a second spinning heel kick, followed by a third. The Kool-Aid Man must have felt like he was standing in front of helicopter blades.

And yet, while his carapace cracked, it just would not break. My second kick had taken another chunk out of his Life-O-Meter, but my third had done no damage at all, leaving him at a full one hundred points. It was as if he was developing some kind of immunity to the attack. I needed to take another tack. And I knew just what tack to take. The touch of death. AKA the Dim Mak: Van Damme’s ultimate weapon. Demonstrated upon Van Damme’s arrival at the underground Kumite, the Dim Mak was a Tanaka clan secret: an open-palm strike so devastating, so surgical, that it enabled Van Damme to explode the fifth brick down—and only the fifth brick down—in a stack of bricks.

I didn’t think. I just crouched in front of the dazed and leaking Kool-Aid Man and channeled all my chi into that single strike—just as Van Damme had done to stagger the seemingly invulnerable sumo wrestler who had torn through every previous challenger with a series of belly laughs.

Obviously, if the Dim Mak didn’t finish the job, Van Damme’s spiritual tutelage had prepared me to drop into a split and throw a bone-crushing uppercut into the Kool-Aid Man’s groin with a deranged kiai!

But my adversary saved me the trouble. As my open palm strike made contact, he exploded—shattering into a million pieces and drenching the room with a tidal wave of glass and fruit punch. Swept up by the deluge of sugary bodily fluids, I lost my footing and tumbled across the room, scrambling to right myself. I came to rest on my hands and knees about fifteen feet away, just below the busted window.

Grabbing what was left of the window sill, I pulled myself to my feet. I realized my sixth sense was receding as my eyesight slowly returned. Looking around, I saw that the walls and ceiling around me were drenched in the Kool-Aid Man’s bodily fluids. The office beyond the swiss-cheesed wall was a ruin. It looked like someone had taken a tractor for a joyride out there. I knew, amidst the rubble lay a pack of executive hand-oids and two Cavity Creep corpses who had been my boss and his hapless date.

“Well, that was all very dramatic,” said Nancy’s mother.

She’d appeared to my left, in her canary yellow pant suit. She looked me up and down, taking in my bruised and bloodied body, then zeroed in on my rumpled skirt, jammed into my boxer briefs.

“To think, my poor daughter could have had all this,” she said with a smirk.

But I wasn’t listening to her. Because I was focused on what she was holding in her hand. Like the boxer briefs, she hadn’t had to cough up the item. She just had it. It was a small vile filled with red liquid, and I knew what it was. At long last, my reward: Lazarus’ Kool-Aid.

I reached out and took it from her. As I did, I felt my Life-O-Meter rebounding, but my sense of my stats was faltering. When I looked down at my forearms, I noticed my tattoos fading. Within seconds, they were gone. My dress and shorts faded away too, leaving me wearing my regular old clothes. As ugly and messy and horrible as it had all been, it was finally over.

Or . . . was it? Not everything was back to normal.

“Wait,” I said. “Why is the office still . . . ”

But I didn’t finish, because I noticed a few droplets of Kool-Aid oozing down the walls with just a hint of purpose. Then a few more, and a few more.

“Uh oh,” Nancy’s mom said.

Beneath my feet, a puddle formed, rising up out of the carpet and flowing toward the epicenter of the Kool-Aid Man explosion, even as shards of glass began flopping end over end toward one another, melding into a central mass. It looked like a sentient jigsaw puzzle piecing itself together.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” I exclaimed, as the process accelerated into a blur, and the Kool-Aid Man was reconstituted and refilled right in front of us.

“This is unexpected,” Nancy’s mom said with a note of genuine bewilderment. Of course, when I looked over to her, I saw that she’d vanished. Typical.

The Kool-Aid Man blinked open his eyes and looked across the office at me.

“Ohhhh yeah,” he whispered as a diabolical grin spread across his face.

It didn’t make any sense. Sometimes video game bosses regenerated, but not like this. My stats had been stripped and my magic briefs were gone. There was no longer a kiai-infused uppercut to the groin locked and loaded to finish the job.

I’d lamented the game’s glitches plenty of times so far, but this was beyond the pale. It was the granddaddy of glitches. The game was over but it wasn’t. I’d won but I hadn’t.

I knew without my RIP stat boosts, that a single attack from the resurrected monster would put me in the ground. But then, as he took a step toward me and the full hopelessness of it all settled on me, I heard a voice from my right.

“Hey, you big red jerk!”

I looked over, and there, standing by the office entrance was Darla, fire burning in her eyes as she stared down the Kool-Aid Man.