When we got to the lobby, we found that the shatterproof windows were cracked, but still holding, and the front door was just barely being held in place by the lamp and power cord that I’d tied around the handles. A pooka was clawing through the slowly widening gap, as cheap metal bent and rubber wiring stretched, and I could see a bloptopus crawling over the heads of other creatures to get to us.

We most certainly did not have an infinite amount of time.

“So I’m thinking we have Four-arms cut the cord holding the front door together, and then Tommy lets loose while we hide.”

“Sure, the door to the stairwell has a window so we can use that as cover.”

“Sounds great, but uh, try and cover your eyes. Otherwise you might go blind.”

“He shoots lasers?”

“Technically they’re hot beams of ionizing plasma, but I’m willing to bet that’d burn our retinas just as well.”

“That’s not Ideal.”

“No, but what can you do?” I shrugged. “You ready?”

“As I can be.” she said.

“Four-arms, Tommy, you all good?” I received five thumbs up between the two. It was showtime. I moved-

“Wait!” Madeline shouted, seemingly coming to a realization.

“What?” I asked.

“Why don’t we just use another barrier?”

“I was just kinda assuming that all they did was block sound.” I responded.

“But we don’t know that.”

“Okay, put one up near the front then, and make it quick.” I said. Things were slamming on the windows as we spoke, and more and more beings pressed themselves against the sides of the building with every passing second.

Plus that blobtopus was getting awfully close to the front door. Though not with much intentionality, it seemed to be stumbling our way through sheer brownian motion more than anything else.

Madeline rolled off to the front of the looby at speed, before furiously tapping on her display. Things got a whole lot quieter, but not silent. I could still hear The scrabbling of claws from the pookas close to us for instance, and the monsters farther back were still clearly intent on murdering us. I watched the crowd for any shifts. Hoping that maybe they’d start to be gradually pushed back by the barrier, but no such luck.

“I don’t think It’s working, Miss Madeline.” I called. Thankfully we were both inside of the barriers silencing effect, meaning we could hear each other just fine.

“No. Darn. I was really hoping that’d be more helpful than it ended up being.”

“Any way we can turn it off? Not hearing a monster creeping up on us would be bad.” I pointed out.

“Yeah, I just gotta tap on a couple things.” she did so, and the sounds of all the hoard came swelling back.

“Ok, hurry back!.” My improvised attempts at barricading the door were doing remarkably well, all things considered, but they were still clearly at the breaking point.

“You don’t have to tell me twice!” She hurriedly took cover next to me again.

Now it was really time to go. I signaled Four-arms forward while we hid behind the entryway Madeline and I had agreed upon as being our first chokepoint.

Tommy followed close behind his other mechanical compatriot, one hand hidden in his trench-coat, presumably grasping his weapon of choice. I could see him tremble slightly with anticipation.

I decided to count them down from three. That way we could execute the first part of the operation smoothly, at least.

“3. . .2-” Before I could even get to one, things went sideways.

That pooka that was clawing through the gap in the middle of the double-doors had apparently not been doing so aimlessly. It had managed to sever the cord that held the doors shut with its sharp claws, and a zombie in chainmail knocked away the remaining half a standing lamp that I’d wedged between the handles with his spear.

I honestly couldn’t tell you what had happened to the broom.

“Fire at will!” I yelped. Four-arms scrambled out of the way as Tommy pulled out the weapon I’d named him after. It was a plasma spewing rifle heavily inspired by the Thompson, officially dubbed the Satellite-Typewriter.

“Cover your eyes!” I shouted at Madeline, who was being uncharacteristically slow to act.

“Right!”

I squeezed them shut just in time to hear a series of bassy thumps attenuate into higher pitched squeals and nearly deafen my ass in the process. Hearing protection probably wouldn’t have gone amiss.

After the noise stopped and I was left with nothing but a bit of ringing in my ears, I peaked around the door frame. A sizable portion of the hoard had evaporated. If I had to guess, maybe about half.

That still left us with what I would charitably qualify as a metric fuck-ton that were eagerly filling in the gaps and rushing through the now open doors like a flood. Tommy and Four-arms made ample use of their thrusters, but only managed to stay just ahead of the pressing bodies. I held the door just long enough to let them slip through, then backed my fragile ass right the fuck up.

Madeline was the one built like a tank, so she rolled past me to take the front.

She drew her sword and poked the first bad guy to make it through. It was a pooka, and the pointy end of her fancy metal stick went right through its neck. She let the slain creature's inertia push her back, and as it dissolved she readied her blade for the next poor asshole.

She only had to wait half a second for ‘em.

It was a Skeleton with studded leather armor barely hanging to its torso. It wielded a shortsword that it didn’t end up getting much of a chance to use.

Madeline raised her claymore high. It glowed, and dark particles lined its edge. She brought it down and cleaved the thing two, her sword passing straight through the skeleton’s armament as it tried vainly to block.

Madeline ended up splitting him roughly down the middle.

“Holy shit!” I shouted.

“You're telling me!” Madeline cried, eyes wide. We didn’t have that much time to be impressed, unfortunately. The monster’s had figured out how to navigate the door, and now two slipped through it at once.

One pooka, and a fiery ghoul with a halberd. I shot the pooka, and Madeline repeated her earlier trick with the other one, reaping him with a sideways slice. That was probably her Strike ability at work.

She may well be out of charges for it if so. I wasn’t sure if the ability lasted a certain period of time, or if it was literally one strike per use. Madeline hadn’t made any attempts to switch with me yet, so I assumed she was still good.

I scanned for my mechs with the spare moment I had. Tommy was on a step just below me. Apparently out of ammo, he’d switched to his secondary weapon, a butterfly knife that ejected a three inch plume of plasma.

Looking at it didn’t immediately blind me, thank god.

Four-arms had climbed atop the back of Madeline’s chair. His unfolded blade was about one and half times his size, so about nine inches, and he held it aloft, with one hand, holding onto Madeline’s chair with the rest of his limbs. I could trust him to have her back, at least.

Three more enemies came. All pookas. Madeline swiped through one of them without assistance from her Strike ability, using one hand to hold the left wheel of her chair so that she could maintain her position. After slaying the first one she pushed herself forward slightly by quickly swiping her left hand along her right wheel and then the left. She then stabbed the other pooka and pulled her blade back out just in time to block the claws of the last one. More monsters were coming in now.

“Leo, switch!”

“On it!” The blow she’d taken with the flat of her sword had enough force to push her back to the bottom step of the stairs. Not that doing so was super impressive. Madeline’s chair was heavy sure, but it was also meant to be agile and its wheels were well lubricated.

I took a step down from where I was halfway up the stairs and shot the pooka that had clawed at her earlier. I got it right in the torso, and while it didn’t die right away, the trampling it got from the other monster eager to get access to us proved more than enough to finish it off.

Madeline sheathed her sword, and pulled herself up the first step before using Accelerate to crash her way past me and onto the next flight. Glancing back, I saw that she didn’t seem to have broken her arm this time.

That was great!

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

Not so great was the fact that the bastards were coming in a continuous flow, meaning we wouldn't be getting any breaks from this point on. So I fired off another precious bullet and went right back up the stairs.

Tommy helped cover me, spinning his beam balisong stylishly. With every flip and spin the knife’s energy blade expanded and lashed out, cutting throats and gouging eyes.

The little show off seemed to be having a pretty good time, overall.

I managed to reach the landing Madeline was on before she had to come back down and bail my sorry hindquarters out. Tommy ended up retreating with me, unable to cut fast enough to stall them entirely.

He probably couldn’t use his knife forever either.

God, there were a lot of them. I debated shooting them as they raced up the steps, but I figured it was best to save my bullets. I armpitted my gun temporarily in order to grab Madeline’s shitty katana out of my inventory. She’d let me borrow it on the no return policy after I said it would probably be good for me to have some sort of bladed melee weapon as well.

I backed up a step to let Madeline hack at zombie. She didn’t use Strike, so that was probably still on cooldown. I pulled free the bargain-bin steel, throwing the wooden sheath at a Pooka, causing it to stumble before being stomped on by its peers.

Madeline stabbed a skeleton through its eye socket and pushed, causing it to fall backwards. She swung at its replacement. I took another step back, not wanting to catch a claymore in the face when she was on her backswing. I could whack something when we had to switch again.

Madeline controlled her positioning remarkably well, but she got forced back bit by bit nonetheless. When she found herself up against the wall, literally on account of the fact that the stairs doubled back, we switched again.

“Leo!”

“Yep!” I stepped forward again and slashed out with my sword. The thing broke right in half on the skull of a pooka.

What a legendary piece of shit!

I examined the remaining half a sword in my hand briefly, before stabbing it in the giant eye of that same pooka. That still didn’t kill it, so I kicked it down the stairs. Madeline managed to escape in the meantime. I shot a ghoul with fire leaking out of its clenched teeth and booked it again. We were on the second floor now.

“Leo, there are a lot more of them, and I don’t like the Idea of giving them access to the second floor!”

She had a point, if we retreated further they could easily slip through the door behind us into the halls, but I didn’t have a solution.

“We’re just gonna have to keep going! We can clear the floors out on the way back down!”

“We’re gonna have to!” Madeline ran a pooka through and flung its not quite dead body down the stairs with a grunt. I shot another skelly in the face.

***

We continued up another two flights of stairs in much the same manner as we had with the previous two, bringing us up to the third floor.

The number of monster’s didn't seem to have visibly decreased. The stairway being so narrow that it could only fit a couple side by side had been our greatest blessing. It was the only reason we’d managed to escape being overwhelmed.

I’d used my last bullet to shoot a zombie in the knee, causing him to fall. Staggering monsters like that had proven more effective than just killing them in some ways, but only marginally. It wouldn’t be long before something else climbed over the body of whatever sorry son of a bitch that had stumbled.

Four-arms had also finally hopped from his perch on Madeline’s chair to bail my ass out. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he’d been reluctant to do so, necessarily, but Madeline was his first priority.

I didn’t blame him. I liked Madeline better than I liked me, too.

But now on the third floor, we were starting to lose momentum. Namely, Madeline was out of charges on her Accelerate ability, and I was out of ammo. The blade on Tommy’s balisong was growing noticeably dimmer as well. He wasn’t taking necks as easily as he had been. He’d settled for cutting ankles, but that had its limits.

Four-arms was pulling double time to make up the difference, but that wasn’t gonna last forever. I could see his thrusters sputter concerningly every now and then. He was clearly running out of fuel.

At the moment I was searching through my inventory for things to throw at the horde below us. I’d already tossed several of my favorite chefs knives, a table leg, and all of my juggling pins.

I knew how to juggle pretty well, actually, I could keep six of the things in the air at once. Though I’d just tossed my sixth one at an approaching blobtopus.

Tommy cut it to pieces soon after, and the plasma kept it from regenerating.

Looking at my inventory, a thought occurred to me. I swiped to my status display. My CR had raised significantly, but more importantly so had my Capacity stat. I had three free points of ATP to work with now.

“Buy me just a couple seconds!” I shouted at Madeline. Some part of me felt like shouting at her like that was rude, but all the clattering and scraping that the hoard made as they climbed the stairs was frankly deafening.

Madeline didn’t waste time responding verbally. She instead viciously cut her way through another armored skeleton, as well as the one after that. Her Strike ability had apparently come off cool down.

I retrieved Fry and Mick-chicken from my inventory and tossed them up in the air before animating them. They wasted no time kicking on their thrusters and opening fire. That bought us some precious breathing room.

Looking at my abilities, I saw that I now had five of them as opposed to the three I started with. I didn’t pay much attention to the listings though, the new additions didn’t seem like they’d be of immediate use, and I already knew what I wanted.

I used my last point on Resupply. It gave me a drop down, I picked Tommy out of the list. He glowed briefly, though no black particulates enshrouded him. He perked right up too, grabbing his favorite blaster back out of his coat.

“Tommy, controlled burst only!” I warned. He seemed to deflate slightly, looking back over his shoulder with his head drooping down.

“Buster, you already got your chance today. Controlled burst!” He turned away from me then, clearly less enthused about his job.

“Cover your eyes! He’s gonna shoot again!” I warned Madeline.

I used my right hand to shield my peepers, but I swear to god I could still see the pink bursts of light through my hand and my closed eyelids. I felt the heat on my skin too. Thankfully Tommy followed orders and did only shoot one controlled burst.

Opening my eyes, I saw that was enough to clear the entire flight of stairs below me. Which bought us all of five seconds before it got filled to the brim with shambling jerks again.

“Madeline, check your display!” I could see on her face that it took a moment to understand and process why I’d have her do that, but she got here pretty quick. Presumably she remembered that I shouldn’t have had any spare ATP to do what I just did.

“I got an extra point! And I have something new in my inventory!” She shouted back at me. “Anything I should use it on in particular?”

“I don’t know, just make it fast!” I kicked a pooka and got a nasty cut on my shin for the trouble. It hurt, but it wouldn’t keep me from walking.

I was all out of weapons, unfortunately. I’d checked my inventory, and all I had left in there were foodstuffs, a finger, and something I couldn’t identify at the top of the list. The fact that I didn’t immediately know what it was, like I did with the things I shoved in there myself, told me that it was probably something like the potions, barriers, or rations. A shop item, in other words.

I really wasn’t in a position to give it my full attention. Madeline finished using her display, and then narrowly saved me from getting a hatchet to the face. She dispatched the unusually fleshy undead with a powerful downswing of her sword. She hadn’t even needed to use Strike to take off a part of his skull.

It was getting pretty crowded.

“Get back Leo!”

“Happy to!” I backed off and hid behind her. I’d felt better about doing that when I had a gun and could help, but her having to pull my hiney out of the fire probably wasn’t all that helpful either.

Madeline hit a skeleton wielding a halberd. It guarded itself successfully against the blow, but Madeline didn’t seem all that bothered. She followed up with a punch that broke two of its ribs, and let that push her chair back. Tommy waited impatiently next to me, clearly having the itchiest trigger finger of his short life. Four-arms had since retreated as well, apparently spent.

I needed to find some way to help, my two other friends were doing their best, but could only do so much. Fry’s little bazooka was about as effective as Mick-chicken’s had been. Mick-chicken’s assault rifle was mostly just an irritant, and he was chewing through all of its ammo just to get the monster’s attention.

It didn’t really seem like an effective use of his time, to be honest. I called Mick-Chicky back and placed him on my palm. I briefly explained my plan, and tossed him up in the air, just above and to the front of Madeline. He then used his thrusters to hover, and his chest plates flipped open to release a barrage of micro missiles.

“Death from above!” I cried dramatically.

Well, death may have been overselling it a bit. Mostly minor wounds and confusion from above, but that didn’t sound as cool.

The thirty something small detonations managed to do a decent job of sowing disorder amongst the enemy ranks. Madeline took the opportunity to scoot forward a bit and then used Strike to cleave through four of them at once.

Now that we had another spare second, I asked Madeline what she’d put her spare point into.

“Accelerate. Me getting stranded is the number one thing I want to avoid here.”

“Fair enough, want to go up the slow way while they’re stunned?” She nodded, and sheathed her claymore. While the baddies were still crawling forward, their speed was greatly diminished. Tommy could cover us while we went up.

“Tommy, use your knife. Don’t blast at anything ‘till I give the word.” He made a show of his disappointment at not being let off the leash, but obeyed nonetheless. After stowing his primary armament, he creeped forward and started evenly hacking at them. The tide was finally seeming to let off some, thank god.

We might just make it.

We booked it upstairs, making it two whole flights before we noticed something was off. Amongst the clamoring cacophony below us, there was a sound that was slowly starting to rise above the rest of it.

A steady, low thumping. It kept its rhythm even as it got louder and louder. Standing on the landing of the fourth floor, I peered over the edge of the railing to look below.

I saw something pushing its way through the rest of the horde. It was bipedal and vaguely tan, with white patches. It had two blade-like appendages in place of its arms, and it was using them to hack its way through the hoard and towards us.

“Whatever the fuck that thing is, I do not like it!” Madeline cried. I had to agree. It was big, heavy, and clearly capable of butchering anything that had the misfortune of not getting out of its way.

That happened to be just about everything, given its size. As it got closer I could see that the tan portions of its exterior were much like armor. A pooka’s sharpened claws scrambled across the surface of it futilely before it was mangled beyond all recognition.

Its arms seemed to cleave through foes with sheer force as opposed to any real sharpness. A plate armored zombie managed to avoid being killed in one blow, but its armor folded in on itself and left it entirely immobilized. The giant cleaver beast didn’t really care to finish it off, it just pressed forward towards us.

And it was fast too, it was close enough now that I could make out its face, or rather lack thereof. It had a kind of pointed cowl for a head, seeming to lack any eyes or other apparent sensory organs. The white patches on its body were made of many wriggling fibers, squirming as it moved.

They reminded me of a timelapse I’d once seen of growing mycelium.

“Tommy, Let ‘er rip!” I yelled. I didn’t have any compunctions about saving ammo in the face of this thing, and neither did Tommy, thank god.

He pulled out his prized Satellite Typewriter and started blasting immediately. I barely had time to clamp my eyes shut so I didn’t go blind.

When I tentatively opened them, I saw the stairs below us cleared entirely of monsters once again, and there didn’t even appear to be any reinforcements. The big guy was still standing, though. He was down an arm and missing part of his head, but that didn’t really make him any less intimidating, nor did it make him any less intimidating.

Fry and Mick-chicky unloaded everything they had on the creature, but their small arms proved entirely insufficient.

It was upon us now.

“Fuck this so much!” I whimpered.