According to the kiosk, we should have been heading toward the North Gate and a loop with African and Arctic animals—polar bears, penguins, and elephants. But as I led the way into the Twilight Menagerie’s ‘Beast’ wing, we realized pretty quickly that things were going to be a little different.
Or a lot.
The sounds of hundreds of different animals echoed off the dungeon’s tall walls and overhanging trees, trapping Tori, Calvin, and me in a hot, humid maze that reeked of animal waste and half-rotten leaves. The place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months.
The pens didn’t exist, either. Every animal’s ‘enclosure’ was marked by a thin rope, but they weren’t in pits, there wasn’t a moat around any of them, and the rope had snapped in places where something big had pushed through it, leaving gaps in even that tiny line of defense.
Worse, I couldn’t help but feel like there were eyes on me, but I couldn’t see them. While it wasn’t as dark as the Redline Tunnels had felt, it definitely earned the name Twilight Menagerie; between the damp fog and the thick canopy overhead, I couldn’t see more than a few dozen yards ahead of me. Tori and Calvin had it worse—both followed me closely, and Tori started at every sound.
It took me a minute to realize that Calvin was jumping, too.
“Dude, do you want to go back to Fort Kiosk?” Tori asked.
The poor guy; he’d been in Vietnam as a combat medic, and this had to be getting to him.
“No,” he snapped. He looked over his shoulder toward the entrance. “No, that won’t help. Getting pinned down is worse than walking into an ambush. At least we’ll be mobile. Let’s just clean this place out so we can move on.”
Tori glanced at him, but I nodded. He was powering through, even though he hated every second of it. “We’ll try to be quick, then.”
According to the map, the first animals were supposed to be macaques, to our left. There definitely was something there, deep in the forest. Brian’s team hadn’t encountered them, but I had a bad feeling they’d just gotten lucky. The macaques—if that’s what they were—moved through the treetops, dropping onto the thick, matted leaves and grouping up around the jungle’s edge.
I readied the Trip-Hammer, pointing at Tori. “Alright. This is a chance to start getting your energy use under control. Grab one or two at a time, but only with enough energy to grab one or two.”
“Got it. Downranked spells only,” she said.
“What?”
Before she could answer, the monsters charged out of the jungle, screaming and jabbering at the top of their lungs. I’d seen macaques at the zoo in Omaha once or twice. These were not macaques.
Macaque Attack Trooper: Level Seventeen Monster
For one thing, they were huge—each was about three feet tall and much bulkier than any macaques I’d ever seen. They were also furless from the waist up, exposing rippling muscles and atrophied breasts. And worse, they each had vicious fangs that had to be the size of my fingers jutting from overgrown, bare-bone jaws.
There were also eight of them.
They ran right at us, thundering across the brick path and closing the gap in the blink of an eye. I yelled for Tori to pull the leaders. Three monkeys slammed into the ground. Another ran into them, but the rest of the troop climbed the monkey pile and threw themselves at us. I triggered the Trip-Hammer and swung. One monkey went flying back into the woods, head at a terrible-looking angle. The rest closed in. They tore at my armor, trying to open up gaps, and knocked me to my feet.
I grabbed one and pulled him off me. As I tossed him, Tori Pulled him away, and he zipped across the waterfall-fed lake to our back, slammed into a cliff, and slid into the water. There was something to what we’d done, but I didn’t have time to think about it. Another macaque’s jaw tightened around my waist, and I shouted out as it pierced my skin.
Unable to swing, I fired the hammer. It pulped the macaque’s chest, and I forced myself to my feet.
Calvin yelled something from behind me. “Tori, cover him!” I shouted. The monster pile-up in front of me was starting to untangle; if those four joined the fight, Tori wouldn’t be able to keep them off Calvin. I charged the macaques before they could get their bearings, ripping the Trip-Hammer through the pile-up.
They exploded.
Gore splattered down around us as the Trip-Hammer spun, tearing the Macaque Attack Troopers limb from limb. The remaining two were on Calvin, but as I watched, Tori ripped the first one away with a Pull. I swung the hammer again but didn’t pull the trigger, and the table saw engine slammed into the last Macaque Attack Trooper with a wet thud.
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“Jesus fucking hell,” Calvin shouted. His eyes went wide, and two experience orbs hit him. “That was really bad. You can do better.” He had the crowbar in his hand, but when I looked at it, the end was clean; he hadn’t swung it.
I bit down a retort.
Tori looked like she was struggling not to say anything. I interrupted before she could make the wrong choice. “Calvin, you want a fast clear so we can move on. Tori, you want to full clear the dungeon to see what happens. I want to save these guys’ lives. We need to work together to make any of that happen.”
Something rustled in the jungle just off the path, and I set my feet and shouldered my hammer. “In the meantime, let’s keep at it.”
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Tori and I spent the next half-hour quietly clearing out more Macaque Attack Trooper troops. That group of eight was the biggest, and by the time we’d cleared out the other four, I’d leveled to Twenty-Two. We’d also gotten a new magic item.
You received Macaque Mask of the Fearsome Roar (Common, Charge 15)
+1 Mana, +1 Body
Wearer can cast the Fear spell for free once every ten minutes.
Fear: Causes one monster or [Homo sapiens] of Level Thirty or below to flee in terror for up to fifteen seconds. Enemies below Level Twenty instead become horrified, and are frozen in place and unable to attack. Boss monsters are unaffected.
My first thought was to give the mask to Tori. She’d be able to use the Mana, and her Body was too low to take many hits. But she didn’t want it. She already had Push/Pull, Crush, Inertia Ball, and Shockwave, and she was still figuring out the spells her class wanted her to use. “Telekineticist gives me a major buff to damage and durations on its spells, and I want to focus on that,” she said.
I shoved the Macaque Mask into my pack. Then, a moment later, I pulled it back out. My first thought had been to scrap it for Charge. That plus the Lock-Grip Gloves would give me enough to build another creation—and I had an idea for a gauntlet that could replace the Lock-Grip Gloves with something way better. That was a long-term project, but I could already see the parts in my mind: wired finger joints, more of the round batteries I’d gotten from the Imbuing Rod, and of course, switches across my palm to control Charge flow.
It was going to be amazing, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
But the effect was better on Calvin than the Charge would be on me. I tossed him the mask. “Use this if you get attacked or Tori needs some breathing room.”
Tori’s eyes narrowed. Then, a second later, they widened. “Oh! He’s playing support.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying sometimes,” Calvin replied.
“No, it’s perfect! You could be a CC caster. Instead of not fighting, you could pull your weight in the party, and that’d speed us toward the full-clear. We’re on a timer, so everyone needs to help,” Tori said. “It’s like timed runs in WoW; the more everyone understands their role, the faster we can go. Or maybe not quite like that.”
Calvin put the mask on, rubbing his temples and staring at Tori. “You’re gonna have to slow down, kid.”
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Once Tori had spent fifteen minutes telling us about the League of Legends champions her friend liked to play, crowd control spells, and how to make Calvin Support work with just the one spell, and he’d spent a few minutes explaining how real-life militaries operated and how support there was very, very different, we pushed deeper into the ‘Beasts’ wing.
The fake-rock mountain in the middle of the loop—and the mist pouring off the waterfalls as they cascaded down it—blocked our view of the far side, but as we pushed forward, the weather grew colder. A swarm of otters with razor-sharp, needle-tipped beaks like a fishing bird’s attacked us, but they weren’t any more challenging than the Macaque Attack Troopers. I leveled up again off of them, putting me at Twenty-Three.
Still, it wasn’t until the polar bear enclosure—mercifully free of said bears, at least from what I could see—that I caught a glimpse of the first boss.
The Beast Glastisant: Level Twenty-Eight Boss
Current Difficulty: Challenging
What do you get when you cross a giraffe and a lion with a crocodile and a snake? Usually, nothing! But sometimes…just sometimes, you get the Beast Glastisant. Also called the Questing Beast for the hunting pack of dogs its roar sounds like, the Beast Glastisant rules over the Twilight Menagerie with an iron claw, hoof, and paw.
Roaming Boss - This boss can appear in other monsters’ lairs, or anywhere throughout the dungeon.
It stepped out of the fog, moving slowly; I didn’t think it had seen us yet, so I motioned to Calvin and Tori to get down and stay low.
The Beast Glastisant looked less like a giraffe and more like a medieval monk had been given a description of one and a pound of drugs and then been told to go ham on a canvas. Branches creaked and leaves rained down as it walked slowly by. The thing’s neck towered over the canopy, so high up I couldn’t even see it, but judging by the muscular, hoofed back legs and lion’s paws on the front, that had to be the crocodile part.
One of its feet hit the bricks only a few inches from Tori’s hand as she crouched low, and I saw her suck in a breath. She didn’t move, though. Another hoof crunched into the bricks, shattering them beneath the massive thing’s weight.
I winced. My battery bombs were worthless without a trigger, and I hadn’t had a chance to develop one with Charge yet. That left me with the Trip-Hammer and a few assorted weapons—none of which were anywhere near as powerful. Tori nodded as I gestured at her, and she started casting Crush.
My plan was simple; as soon as she Crushed the leg nearest to her, I’d attack it. We’d try to destabilize the whole boss, bringing it to the ground before it could reach down and attack us, then pummel it while it was down.
But before Tori could finish casting Crush, the Beast Glastisant’s leg lifted up. It hit her in the head, knocking her over into the lake.
The monster froze.
I took one breath. Then another. Nothing happened. Maybe it hadn’t noticed. Tori was a lot smaller than the thing’s leg; it could have decided she was just a rock or something.
Tori surfaced. Something sniffed up above, like a big cat hunting for its dinner. I readied the Trip-Hammer as the water rippled behind her.
The baying of dozens of dogs filled the air as a massive crocodile head pushed through the trees, the smell of rotten meat rolling from its breath.