Chapter 131 – The not so secret quest
Jack's face turned sour as he realized just whose sanctuary he was in. Gideon. His eyes fell to the surrounding adventures, and he started counting them up.
Thirty or so warriors, archers lining the walls and rooftops with what looked like the occasional mage mixed into the ranks. This will be difficult, Jack thought to himself.
“Excuse me, is everything all right?” Zeth hissed.
Jack glanced back at the snake man, his thoughts returning back to reality. He felt a tugging at his hand and realized he had the snake’s three fingered hand in a vice grip, still shaking it up and down absentmindedly. He let go and the snake immediately cradled his hand, a look of concern in his yellow serpent eyes.
Jack quickly realized he couldn’t just go killing everyone here. That would be insane, even for him. Still, this wasn’t exactly a good situation for him to be in.
Jack felt his teeth grind together as he thought back to the events on the first floor. That final fight. Gideon’s betrayal. Sarah’s death. The entire fight had been chaotic from start to finish. There weren’t any real witnesses to Gideon killing her. Just Jack, who already didn’t have a great reputation among the people on the first floor. Despite the fact that he had called out Rodeo’s inevitable betrayal, people still had a hard time believing him. His accusations that Gideon killed Sarah fell on mostly deaf ears. He was told over and over again that it didn’t make sense. That something must have happened in the chaos of the fight that caused her death. As for Gideon’s disappearance they all seemed to think it was inevitable. He was never supposed to be there in the first place. One idiot even suggested Jack might be going crazy and have PTSD from the whole thing. That was the first person he killed, and that sort of soured his reputation.
The thing was though, they had been right. It didn’t make sense.
Jack had played it over in his head a thousand times to the point of actual insanity. All he could assume was somehow Sarah was some sort of rip cord for him to escape the first floor. Hannah even went so far as to look into spells and magics that might have that sort of “kill this person to escape sort of effect”. But even that logic felt shallow at best, and Hannah wasn’t able to turn up anything definitive. They were missing pieces of the puzzle. Gideon had a reason for killing Sarah. The more he thought about it the hazier his thoughts would get as rage built in the pits of his stomach. darkness clouded his mind, and a nonstop ringing would grow louder and louder in his head.
Don’t think about her, Jack told himself, a mantra that was now carved into his brain. Gideon needed to die. That was the only thing he needed to think about.
“…Sir?”
Jack glanced back over the snake. By now the entire group of adventurers was staring at him and he realized he had been spacing out for too long.
“Sorry,” Jack said with a forced smile, “you mentioned Gideon and that brought up a lot of hard memories.”
“Oh really? I heard he had somehow made it on to the first floor with Humanity, thus forging the bonds we share with you today. Were you perhaps one of his companions?” Zeth asked, his head tilting to the side in curiosity.
Several others moved in closer, interested to hear Jack’s answers. Zeth had called him Lord Gideon and Jack was starting to wonder if the dragon had gone off and founded a cult under the guise of protecting humanity.
Pushing aside the possibility of this being a creepy dragon sex cult was a far more pressing concern – Jack wanted to kill Gideon, but what did Gideon want from Jack? Did he know if anyone of them were still alive even? Gideon had disappeared right when shit was hitting the fan, and it’s not like he would have had any reason to believe that they could’ve survived against Rodeo. He killed Sarah, so did that mean he wanted the rest of us dead?
Jack bit down in frustration as a familiar ringing in his ears returned. Too many unknowns. He needed to get the hell out of here.
“I’m Nutt,” the goblin squeaked, “and that’s Jack!” he pointed to Jack with an excited grin. Jack groaned internally. The goblin had clearly forgotten the story he told him, and that he wanted Gideon dead. In fact, the goblin seemed excited to be here.
“Jack, is it?” I don’t recall hearing of Lord Gideon working with a Jack. Although he’s shared little to anyone about his time on the first floor. It’s all quite mysterious actually. I do feel like I have heard that name somewhere before though…” Zeth trailed off, scratching at his chin.
“It’s a pretty common human name,” Jack glanced at the crowd and cleared his throat. “You mind if we talk somewhere else? It’s been a hectic past few hours and I could use a drink.”
“Of course! Where are my manners? You must be exhausted. This city is an absolute mess right now. Please, Nisha, take them to the cantina and get them situated, will you? We can discuss business after you’ve gotten some rest.” Zeth gave a small bow and then slithered off, issuing commands and dispersing the group of surrounding adventurers.
Nisha, the elderly fire mage that had lead him here brought them to a small clump of buildings. Carved into the side of the building was an open window and an Orc taking food orders on the other side. As Jack and Nutt sat down at one of the surrounding tables Nisha brought over a humble serving of dried meats and bread with a few flasks of water for everyone. Jack eyed the greying dried meat suspiciously.
“Supply chains are all but nonexistent in sector six, and thanks to those damn Tortuga’s there's not a lot of great options for sustenance,” she said with a frown, biting out a chunk of her own dried meat.
“So, this isn’t normal?” Jack asked.
“Not sure,” she shrugged, “only been on the floor a few months myself so I couldn’t point you to what normal looks like exactly.”
“But it doesn’t look like this, right? Hordes of zombies and ghouls rampaging through the city,” Jack gave a vague gesture to the walls behind him.
“Correct. This is because of the painted shell tribe taking ownership of the sector six and letting everything go to shit. The golden scale has set up a small base here to help people get out of the sector, and maybe even take over the sector ourselves.”
“Explain,” Jack asked.
Nisha took a long pull from her flask of water before staring at Jack.
“I’ll give you the same explanation that I got,” she started with the sort of sigh of a story told several times over.
“First you need to understand Broken Moon City and its layout. It’s a large circular city broken down into six sectors, with a small section in the middle where Mayor Mortimaxx resides. Each sector of the city is populated by an undead race and ruled over by a city council member. Sector six is zombies. Sector five is skeletons. Sector four is abominations. Sector three is ghosts. Sector two is necromancers – I know this is technically a class but they’re all undead and they’re all summoners of some type or another,” she said with a hand wave, “and last is sector one, chock-full of vampires.”
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Jack nodded along.
“As I’m sure you’re aware from your quest, one of the objectives is to take control of a sector. This is done by killing whatever undead councilor is currently in control of the sector you're in. Once you’ve killed a leader and assumed control you gain access to a city building interface that allows you to make improvements to the sector.”
“What kinda improvements?” Jack asked.
“Depends,” she shrugged, “you can spawn in item shops, all types of vendors. One sector was able to spawn in some rare class trainers. You can spawn in bosses with rare and powerful treasures, and even control the flow of monsters that get generated in your sector. You can turn it into an industrious little section of the city, or a haven to hunt monsters. There are a lot of variables to what exactly can be done to improve your sector.”
“Then why is this sector such a shithole?”
“Because of those turtled brained idiots in control,” Nisha grimaced. “Like I told you, there is a city building interface you get control of that allows you to improve your sector, however upgrades require a resource called City Coins. City Coins are earned by creating appropriately difficult quests for the people in your sector to complete. When an adventure completes a quest they get their reward and the faction in control gets a City Coin to use on sector upgrades.”
“What kinda quests are the turtles handing out?”
“They aren’t.” Nisha said with an annoyed look. “The only thing those idiots are doing is charging people a beast heart to get inside. They don’t actually care about the sector or the city building at all it seems. An absolute waste of free resources the idiots,” she finished with a huff.
“Why do they want the hearts so bad?”
“It’s an important reagent for their race upgrade,” Nisha muttered. “It’s also the reason they’ve been able to maintain control of the sector for so long. They’ve built quite the little fortress and are turning their entire population into some impossible to kill super turtles with their race upgrade. Meanwhile, the entire sector is turning into a zombie hell hole because they aren’t issuing any quests to thin out the herds. Everyone just pushes deeper into the city, not bothering with sector six.”
“Where are they going?”
“All the way to the second sector where the Twilight Lord reigns supreme.”
“Twilight Lord?”
“You’ve seen the summer elves, right? The abnormally tan hippie elves who worship the sun?”
Jack nodded, remembering Elera.
“Twilight elves are their counterpart. Black skin, moon obsessed elves. The Twilight Lord set up shop in the second sector about two hundred years ago and has been in charge ever since.”
“What’s so good about sector two?”
“He’s been improving the sector for over 200 years now. Lots of good shopping to be done there, and plenty of quests. You can knock out pretty much the entirety of your floor two objectives there. He isn’t stingy about letting people into his faction, has turned it into a business of sorts. Floor two is widely considered a huge waste of time so most people try to get through it quickly and head to floor three.”
“And no one has tried to take him out and take over the sector for themselves?”
“Sector progress gets reset when faction leaders change hands. If you want to make a lot of enemies then sure, go kill the guy and erase two hundred years of sector improvements and has more or less streamlined the floor two quest.”
“And what about this Mayor Mortimaxx guy? Does he actually do… mayor stuff?” Jack asked.
“Depends on what you consider mayoral duties. He’s more of a facilitator. A lot of people are actually hoping he gets involved here in this sector. When a sector gets to out of control Mayor Mortimaxx will show up with his arbiters and clean house, replacing the faction leader with one of his summons and resetting the sector. Beyond that he supposedly will issue quests out to faction leaders, but I couldn’t tell you if that’s true or not.”
“What happens if I kill the mayor? Do I become king of the castle?”
Nisha smiled, like she had been waiting for that very question.
“So you’ve already heard about the secret quest, then?”
“No. You know about it?” Jack’s ears perked up. There was a certain centipede god that was going to make his life hell if he didn’t complete it.
“Everyone knows about the secret quest,” she said, making air quotes as she said the word secret. “It’s something of a legend after all. Did you know this floor has never had the secret quest completed?”
“I’ve heard…” Jack muttered, “So what is it?”
“If you manage to take control of three sectors of the city then you’ll get the secret quests. Kill Mayor Mortimaxx and become the cities new mayor.”
“That’s it? That’s the secret?”
“Easy, right?” Nisha grinned.
Jack’s stared at her smile. He was missing something. No way it was this easy.
“You can go kill Mayor Mortimaxx right now if you wanted to,” she said, “it’ll be a hell of a difficult fight, but you could do it. People have done it before. In fact, a lot of elite powerhouses who make their tower climbing debut like to kill him off as a sort of rite of passage on the second floor.”
“What, does he not die?”
“It’s complicated. In order to become the mayor of Broken Moon, you have to earn the right to challenge him. In order to earn the right, you have to control all six sectors of the city. Once that has happened, you and the six councilors that you’ve put in charge of the city can then go and officially fight Mortimaxx for the right to be Mayor. But even still, there’s the lich problem that you have to figure out.”
“The lich problem?” Jack stared blankly at Nisha who gave him a solemn nod.
“Mayor Mortimaxx is a Lich. A lich’s life force is stored within a phylactery. Unless you destroy the phylactery first, you can’t actually permanently kill the lich, only force him to respawn,” she said as though it was supposed to be common knowledge.
“And I assume nobody knows where he keeps his phylactery hidden?”
“Nope,” she shrugged.
Jack rubbed at his temples. It wasn’t that any of this seemed overly complicated. It just seemed like it was going to be annoying. For starters it sounded like he needed at least six other people to pull this quest off. He wasn’t even sure he knew six people. Still though, something was bothering him. This quest didn’t sound insurmountable by any means, and he was supposed to believe no one had ever been able to pull this off? He was still missing something.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Jack asked.
“The force multiplier,” Nisha said as though she knew the question was coming. “For every sector of the city that isn’t controlled by the undead, the city becomes that much more dangerous. For instance, you remember the ghouls, correct?”
Jack nodded.
“With one sector of the city under control, the zombie population doubled within this sector, and is growing exponentially every day. That was the first multiplier. When a second sector was taken under control, ghouls were added into the mix. Buffs like these happened in each sector of the city. I’m sure you can imagine how much harder things will become if a third sector is taken under control.”
Jack sighed. Always a fucking catch.
“And let me guess, these buffs also apply to the city mayor?”
“Yes.” Nisha gave him a somewhat defeated smile. “For every sector of the city you gain control of, the next sector becomes that much more powerful. And let’s not forget, you aren’t alone on the second floor. You have to contend with all the other races of the Tower. Sure, some might help you and join your faction, but some might harass you and attack you and stop you from completing the quest so that they can get it instead. It becomes a mess of a situation very quickly. You’ll find yourself with a lot of enemies the second you gain control of three sectors. For instance the Twilight Lord won’t take kindly to someone threatening his slice of paradise.”
“I was wondering why people aren’t taking control of more than one sector. Guess it makes sense now.”
“Yes, it’s certainly more advantageous to take control of multiple sectors. From what I understand you unlock greater rewards from the city building interface for every sector you control, but good luck maintaining all of that.”
Jack chewed on his lip and leaned back in his chair, looking up at the cracked moon that hung dead center over the city. He glanced over at Nutt and realized why the goblin had been so quiet the entire time. He was taking sips from the green vial of hallucinogenic ghoul piss he had bottled up earlier. The goblin looked back at him with a wild look in his eyes. He’s definitely tripping balls right now, Jack thought with an amused smirk.
“What do you say Nutt, wanna be mayor?” Jack asked.
The goblin gave him a wide manic smile and nodded excitedly.