“Well, we’ve got a few hours until mister I don’t care how big the room is, I cast fireball respawns, so let’s make sure this room is secure and look into the warehouse.” Warren was issuing orders like a proper leader, holding back a smile and turning a blind eye to the surreptitious fist bumps the tall woman was receiving. He beckoned her over to the bend in the corridor with a wave. “Tina. You know what this is about.”
Tina looked contrite, but slightly belligerent too. “Fine,” she huffed. “I’m sorry I killed that guy. But he had it coming. Look at my hair.”
Being fair to Tina, the fireball had burned the hair off the left half of her head and the globlin goo had scarred the exposed skin. She looked like an extra that had been rejected from a Mad Max film for being too ugly. “I get that you’re angry,” Warren held up his hand in a placating gesture. “And I’m going to berate you in front of the rest for it. This is just a friendly reminder that you can’t go around killing teammates. No matter how much they deserve it. Even if they don’t stay dead.”
“UUHHHgghhh. I knowww.” Tina’s shoulders slumped. “Do I have to apologise when he gets back?”
“Let’s not take it too far,” Warren scratched his chin. “He will be getting a public dressing down and have to say sorry to everyone or he gets the boot. Now, head back over there with everyone else, and send my cousin over please.”
“The hot one with the big,” she raised her eyebrows suggestively, “sword?”
“He’s my cousin, Tina. I do not want that image in my head. Just send him over.”
Tina wandered over to where Chad was making small talk with the melee focussed types while they watched for more globlin incursions. There had been one or two blobs flow through the rock wall since the big one had died, but they were quickly destroyed before they could become a threat. Tina ran her hand down Chad’s shoulder and whispered in his ear. Chad grinned and jogged over to where Warren was waiting.
“Brah! This game a mad!” Chad’s smile threatened to give him a flip top head. “It’s got everything! Traps! Monsters! Explosions!” Chad held out a fist.
Warren bumped fists then blew it up. “Explosions!” he echoed. He schooled his face slightly into his leader expression and continued, “Chad, I’m glad you’re having a blast. Not as much as those guys,” he indicated the worst injured who were sipping at healing potion bottles, “but having fun. Since this is your first time I have some warnings that they don’t put on the box. First, there’s no pain limiters here. Getting stabbed or burned hurts. Kick that rock for me.”
Chad kicked the indicated rock and made a sound like a foghorn that didn’t match the movement of his lips.
“Yeah, that’s number two,” Warren pointed out. “Until we’re eighteen there’s a profanity filter, alcohol restrictions and simplified looting. Most of that came from the first couple patches when helicopter parents threw a fit.”
Chad kept making horn noises, testing to see what would trigger the filter and what wouldn’t.
“I don’t know how it works, but it seems to sense intent not literal words. Watch what happens when I say pants instead of a swear word here,” Warren explained. He opened his mouth and the sound of a macaque screaming came out. “So you can stop trying to beat the system, it’s just annoying and the house always wins.”
Chad’s ever effusive expression dimmed slightly, and he tried once more. The sound of a moose in heat was all that came out. He brightened again. “Does that mean that people over eighteen still hear the swearing? Even if we can’t?”
Warren shrugged. “Cannae say. Nobody’s tried asking, s’far’s I know. Next up is related to the pain part. If you die, your body gets sent to a casket or coffin at your respawn point. In there it gets rebuilt, whatever damage it suffered is healed. Most people log out at that point, because it’s the same as suffering the damage in reverse.
“Bummer,” Chad kicked the rock again, as if it would have a different effect the second time. “Ah’m no masochist, dude. I would straight up not have a good time in a tiny box.”
“Just as I thought. Now, you’ve got a decent sized weapon there with pretty good reach. You’ve already said you’re not a masochist so do you want to be part of the damage dealers?” When Chad looked confused, Warren explained further. “The tanks get in first and tank the hits, hence the name. The damage dealers go in second and do the actual hurting. Unless you want to get some ranged skills under your belt? You any good with a bow? Or throwing knives?”
“Nah, brah. I’ll join the double d’s,” Chad held out his hands in front of his chest, miming a well endowed woman. “Is there an officer track here? What’s the advancement process?”
Warren rolled his eyes. “The only officer here so far is me. The advancement process is don’t die and we’ll see. There’s only about fifteen of us so far. The only rule is don’t be a dick.”
“I guess not everyone got the memo,” Pham said, ambling over. He looked pointedly at where a patch of blood remained after the elementalist had despawned. “If you two are done swapping high fives and handies, can we move on?”
“Only you?” Chad asked, a hint in his voice.
“Pham is an external contractor and not subject to guild rules,” Warren rumbled. “Especially the not being a dick part. Apparently.”
They crossed the room to where the doors were set into the wall. The last time they had been this far it had been at a dead run, leaping up the split level and fighting their way through the door. This time the door was opened easily and they found themselves in a well lit warehouse. Rows of racking towered over everyone as they walked the aisles cautiously, keeping an eye out for traps and enemies. Warren found a device similar to a forklift but with a single large plate instead of forks. He called Pham over to look at it while Pham’s entourage searched the walls and floors for danger.
“Yeah, I don’t think I can get this thing moving any time soon,” Pham conceded. “She’s locked up tight. How about we check the crates and find a way forward?”
The looting team were called for, and when they refused to come alone, escorted through the trapped hallway and past the loading dock. Every one of them had an oversized backpack on to supplement their inventory space as they couldn’t fit the cart down into the labyrinth. They started on the ground level crates, pulling them out into the middle of the aisle and cracking them open. The contents weren’t particularly interesting, for the most part they were basic ores like iron and copper, powderised and compressed into bars. They discovered this when Dean dropped one and it burst into a cloud of iron dust that wafted across the floor.
A few crates contained carbon moulds for metal parts that Pham got very excited about. “These are ace! You pour the molten metal into them, let them set and bingo! Instant robot bits! I bet somewhere in here there’s a bot factory!” He stashed a few in his inventory and headed to the back wall to see if he could get the door there to open.
Curious, Warren grabbed a pair of moulds that looked a bit like a breastplate and stashed them himself while the looting crew finished their scavenger run and packed up. “We’re done here boss man,” Samantha said, hoisting the backpack on her back. “We’ll drop this lot off at the surface.”
“Buh-by,” Chad said, leaning on the wall by the door to the loading dock.
With a horrible rattling shriek the roller door started to move. The looters didn’t even stop to see what was going on, they took off towards the entrance as though all the demons in hell were nipping at their heels. Chad threw himself sideways, his sword coming free of his back as he hit the floor and skittering under a crate. Pham gave a pained shout as his arm whipped out straight and tossed the tool he’d been using across the room as a shower of sparks bounced off his face.
More shouting came from the other side of the doors. A muffled scream was cut off suddenly. Some of those who had been guarding the loading dock tried to pile through the smaller door at the same time, leading to a Three Stooges moment as they jammed in the doorway. The jam cleared as one of the bodies was ripped backward and the other two fell to the floor.
Warren grabbed he closest fallen body. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
Tim, the summoner with the spectral rabbits was paler than his minions. “Globlin tsunami.”
Warren’s head whipped around. “Pham!” he shouted. “How’s that door coming?”
“Gonna need a minute!” Pham shouted back, trying to reach between two crates for his lost tool.
By this time the roller door was half way up and Warren had a fantastic view of the chaos in the previous area. Tim hadn’t been lying, the clear wave that had streamed between the fallen rocks at the upper end of the cavern dwarfed anything they’d seen before. The tanks were doing their utmost to interpose themselves between the lashing tendrils and the damage dealers that hadn’t fled but there simply weren’t enough bodies for the job. Nobody had died yet but everyone was hard pressed. The ranged focussed members were backed up against the wall, toe to toe with smaller globs that had been ejected from the larger mass.
“Fighting retreat!” Warren bellowed over the cacophony. He ran his hands over the area where Chad had been leaning looking for the door control. Feeling a raised oblong area he tried pressing every inch of the surface while keeping an eye on the fight. The top section had no effect at all but pressing the middle he felt the hard lump deform minutely and the door stopped moving. Shifting his fingers to the bottom he pressed again and the shriek resumed with added rattling but at least the door was coming down. “Tanks, hold one minute! Melee, targets of opportunity as you pull out. Ranged, fall back and cover fire. Go. Go. Go!”
The damage dealers broke off from the main fight, pausing to help the ranged weapon users put down the mini-globlins as they dashed into the warehouse. This gave the massive globlin fewer targets to share the hurt amongst but they held the line. Once arrows and bullets started whizzing past them they spun on their heels and dashed for the rapidly closing roller door. As they were the largest and strongest among the Travellers they easily vaulted the dock and slid under the door.
Right behind them the globlin splashed against the dock like a wave against a harbour wall. The splash spread smaller, angrier versions of itself through the aisles that lashed out at whoever was closest. The largest of them was no bigger than a house cat and they were all killed swiftly or punted back into the main mass. The tanks formed up in the aisles facing the roller door as the constricted space let them hold the line the way they had when facing the earlier puddle of goo. The fighters ducked between to inflict what wounds they could as the ranged members launched everything they had but Warren could see that this was not a sustainable situation, let alone a winnable one. Even though the roller door was trying to shut the bulk of the globlin was holding it at bay.
“Pham, talk to me,” Warren shouted over his shoulder as he stepped back from skewering a mini-glob that had snuck around to attack the remaining mages from the side. The blob of rage and acid turned into a slippery puddle.
“Almost there,” Pham yelled back. “Get ready to evac, this door will close again once I pull the pick out of these contacts and there’s no way to open it again.”
“Got it, thanks!” Warren jumped forward to cut off a questing tendril before it could wrap around Tina’s leg then cupped his hands over his mouth to shout over the fight. In the confined space the clash was louder than it had been out in the cavern. “Door’s about to open. Same as before, mages, melee, ranged, tanks. On my mark!”
Pham jammed the little metal piece into the workings of the switch. The lock clunked loud enough to be heard over the fight and the door inched open with a whine. Once the gap was wide enough Pham squeezed through and leaned on the wall on the far side, a piece of string connected to the pick pulled taught.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Ready!”
“Retreat!” Warren shouted.
As with the first withdrawal the mages shoved through the door and into the hall on the far side. The fighters cleaned up the few smaller globs that were harassing the ranged members and let them pull out too.
Soon it was just the tanks and Warren left facing the transparent tsunami that had forced its way under the door. The globlin reared up, touching the ceiling and the remainder of Warren’s crew took the hint to book it. Warren dived through the door last as Pham yanked on the string, landing just past where Pham sat and sliding a short distance. The huge globlin’s attack hit just before the door slammed shut, cutting off a small portion of its mass in the hall right beside Pham. It immediately began trying to savage the soles of Warren’s feet making him curl up in pain and out of reach, leaving only one possible victim. Pham pulled a brand new, shiny adjustable wrench from a loop on his belt and laid into the globlin beside him, screaming the whole time.
Chad came up and caught the wrench as it descended again. “Chill brah. You got it. It’s dead.”
Pham looked up at Chad’s perpetually friendly face, breathing heavily. “Yeah, sorry. Kinda lost it a bit there.”
A thump from the door drew everyone’s attention.
“It can’t get through there, can it?” Chad asked, suddenly a lot less chill.
“We’ve never gotten this far before,” Warren answered, standing up and wincing at the pain in his feet. “No idea. Best get moving though.”
The sound of something heavy slamming into the door spurred them into action. Warren took the lead, pushing down the hall past the rest but giving reassuring claps on shoulders and the occasional uplifting aside to those who looked like they needed it. The hall itself was unremarkable with red bricks set into grey mortar and a polished stone floor the same as the warehouse. Light came from long rectangular crystals overhead just out of reach by the tallest of them. These lights went entirely unmolested as everyone was too tense from the fight they had just escaped and the potential fight ahead. At the far end of the hall was another door though this one was open already.
Stepping out into a much larger room, Warren looked around. A maze of pipes joining cabinets obscured the far end or the hall but a lit room overlooking the maze was visible above them.
Another thump, this one with a metallic screech had everyone pouring out of the hallway into the room. In the jostling, several people were bumped into pipes to find that they were scaldingly hot. After a few complaints and weird sounds as swearing was censored, the remaining members fitted themselves into the maze without getting burned.
Warren did a headcount to see what he had to work with. “Who’s not dead? Sound off!”
“Not dead!”
“Also not dead!”
“I swallowed a bug!”
“Ya mama shoulda swallowed!”
Warren thumped Dennis in the shoulder, making the chains on his axes jingle. “We’ve talked about this, taunts are for?”
“Taunts are for enemies, not for team,” Dennis admitted. “But she lobbed that one over the plate. How could I not take a swing at it?”
“Low hanging fruit. You’re better than that.”
The next thump from the hall ended in the crashing of glass breaking. Warren shouldered his way to the door again, peering down the hallway. The door to the warehouse was still mostly intact though badly buckled. The glass portal in the top had shattered under the globlin’s abuse however. Through that gap the creature was oozing, dropping off chunks of itself that glooped up into vaguely humanoid shape to shamble forwards. It was eerily quiet except for the squelching footsteps all marching in time.
“They’re coming!” he shouted back. “Form up, you know the drill. Combat types, protect the door. Pham, see what you can do about finding us an exit.”
“Already on it,” Pham’s voice echoed over the maze of pipes. “It’s a pressure lock over here. We need to direct whatever is flowing in these pipes to the door.”
There wasn’t enough space around the door to form a proper defensive line, so Warren paired up a tank with an offsider and alternated them as best they could fit. Unsurprisingly, Chad stood beside Tina with his massive sword drawn and standing in a heroic pose. The ranged damage members were positioned on the other side of the pipes and instructed to fire through the gaps, giving them decent cover if a limited arc of fire. Dennis especially was struggling to throw knives through the gap and there was no way his axes would fit. His voice on the other hand reverberated throughout the room and bounced off walls as he chanted a buff giving ditty.
“What the?” a panicked voice shouted over Warren’s orders. At the top of the stairs one person was inside the control room, hammering on the door to get out, and two others were outside trying to get in. “Lemme out!”
Warren recognised the trapped Traveller as the one who had won a coffee off Pham earlier. He was a new guy that had joined a few days ago so Warren hadn’t memorised his name yet, but anyone who could impress Pham enough to score food from him was someone to keep an eye on. If he survived.
“Quit messing about!” Warren yelled. “Start getting the flow to the door! You two, get that door open. Don’t care how!”
With assurance that someone was working to free him, the trapped man began scanning the cabinets in the room, twisting taps and turning valves to see what they would do. Down at floor level the pipes rattled and brass whistles mounted on top of the cabinets sounded out and stopped randomly as the pressure changed.
The sound of the whistles seemed to enrage the globins further. Their squelching march transformed into a splashing charge. The first one slammed into Tina’s shield and almost drove her into a pipe but Chad steadied her from behind with his shoulder to her back. She smacked her attacker in the head with her morning star instinctively even though the creature had no vital organs anywhere in its translucent body. Chad stepped to her right and bisected the globlin from top to bottom. The two halves formed balls that came at them at knee height but were batted back by Tina’s shield and Chad wielding his sword like a cricket bat. The one that Chad struck sailed through the air into a pipe where it stuck like a tongue to a frosty pole. After a few seconds of bubbling and steaming it dissolved into a puddle of goo and dripped to the floor.
The one that Tina had shield bashed flew back into the hallway where it landed on the chest of an incoming globlin. The impact slowed its charge but the smaller glob was absorbed into the mass of the larger one. The creature resumed its charge and forced its way past Tina and Chad to be stopped by the next pair. Warren was confident in his game plan and turned his attention to getting them out. He dashed through the maze, getting turned around and hitting dead ends only once or twice before he found his way to where Pham was poking at the door in the far wall.
“Door” was a generous term, it was an iron plate held closed by three pistons the thickness of Pham’s whole body.
“What do you think is on the other side, that it needs this kind of opener?” Warren stood back out of Pham’s way.
“I don’t think it’s what’s on that side, it’s what’s on this one,” Pham said. “The way the hinges and pistons are arranged it looks to be preventing the door from opening in the case of something catastrophic happening in here.”
“Like what?” Warren edged away from the nearest pipe. “Is this place going to explode or something?”
“More like invasion, I’d say,” Pham answered sardonically. “Perhaps from something that can change its shape?” He completely refrained from looking towards the fighting on the far side of the room.
“Oh. Yeah.”
A loud thumping from the windows of the control room distracted them from further discussion. The guy who was trapped in the room was standing on the control panel and throwing himself at the glass. “Help! Gas! The room is filling with gas!”
“Pham, leave that. We gotta get him out of there.” Warren hustled to the foot of the stairs and called out to the two who were working on the door. “What’s the holdup? Why isn’t the door open yet?”
“Boss, this thing is solid iron. It came down out of the ceiling the moment he stepped through,” one responded.
“I’m pretty sure the lock is on the inside,” the other added, waving a pry bar. “It’s dead smooth on this side. I’m trying to get a wedge under it to lever it up but there’s no purchase.”
“Have you tried cutting through it?” Warren floundered for a solution. “Or hitting it? Drilling?”
“No, we don’t have the tools. No, we’re not stupid. And yes, the drill bit wouldn’t bite,” the one with the pry bar answered, slightly exasperated. “I think his only way out is the glass.”
Warren stepped back so that they guy in the control room could see him. “What’s your name?” he called.
“Steve!” he called out, leaning his whole body against the glass. “My name is Steve!”
“We’ll get you out Steve, but you have to get that door over there open,” Warren assured the distraught man. “We’re all getting out of here, but only if you do your job.”
Steve wiped his face with his arm and climbed off the control panel. Warren could see him moving from rack to rack as a green, heavier than air mist swirled into view.
A crash from the entrance to the room reminded him that the fight wasn’t over. Tina’s limp body tore through the cabinet she’d been in front of to smack limply against the pipes on the other side and fall bonelelssly to the floor with the smell of burnt hair and cooked pork. Chad bounded over the wreckage and attempted to bring her around. After a few seconds of shaking and calling her name, he was able to get her back to her feet, though groggily and not ready to leap back into the fray.
Warren stepped into the gap to help shore up the defences. He cut, sliced, spun and dodged as the globlin forces eked their way into the room. His teammates were doing their best, but the enemy wasn’t just aiming for them, it was trying to wreck the equipment in the room too. As had happened to Tina, the creatures would align their biggest hits to punch through the tanks or knock them into the pipes and cabinets. Every time a cabinet was reduced to chunks or pipes knocked free the globlins had more room to move and more space to accrete into bigger forms. Those bigger forms then had more strength to wreak more havoc.
As Warren watched, two already enhanced globlins rammed themselves together to create an oversized quadrupedal monstrosity, like a headless horse with four back legs to kick with.
And kick they did. Bodies went flying across the room, leaving trails of wreckage in their wake. Steam hissed and billowed until the auto cutoffs in the cabinets stemmed the flow. The destoyed cabinets themselves revealed pipe mouths that disappeared under the floor, thankfully with safety valves of their own that shut off when they were exposed.
Feeling like all was lost and they were all moments from a total party wipe, Warren cast about for a solution. Pham was doing something incomprehensible to some of the remaining cabinets on the far side of the room. Steve was standing on the control panel again, the gas halfway up the windows now as he hammered on the glass begging for release. The scattered fighters were pulling themselves from the wreckage, still ready to tango but clearly exhausted.
Overhead, a gantry moved in the dark. Warren only noticed it because he was looking up at Steve, who was walking back and forth on the control panel looking for the highest point in the room. A nozzle on the gantry moved like the tip of a 3D printer then irised open to release not melted plastic but a mechanical humanoid. Warren recognised it as one almost identical to the ones they had seen in the entrance. They’d only fought them the once, but the rust red bodies had left an impression.
It certainly left an impression on the globlin it landed on. The quadruped was reduced to goo on the walls by the impact. The mechanical man held no weapons, simply stomping forward to drive its metal fists into anything that didn’t belong in the room. Chad learned this the hard way as he tried to support the machine the way he had Tina, who was still leaning on a wall getting her thoughts back in order.
Pham appeared at Warren’s elbow like a sneaky sneaky butler. “The enemy of my enemy is my enemies’ enemy, no more, no less,” he said, as if reading from a book of maxims.
Warren leapt to the side with a distinctly unmanly sound. He tried to cover it with a cough and growled, “Never do that again. Why are you here and not opening that door?”
“It’s moving,” Pham pointed. “Slowly, but it’s moving. We should retreat now.”
As Pham was speaking a second red mechanoid dropped from the nozzle above, moving to join its now damaged compatriot. The globlins hadn’t been idle, nor had Warren’s crew. Though they’d had to give the mechanoid a wide berth, the humans had leapt back into the fight with as much enthusiasm as they could muster. With the addition of the mechs, the fight had become a stalemate as the globlins entering were being dispersed before they could come together into more powerful forms. A third mechanoid dropped in just as the first fell, its chest a smoking crater from a globlin’s caustic tentacle.
The cabinets Pham had been fiddling with each sprouted a brass whistle from the top which all began to emit their haunting moan. The door to the control room slid back into the roof and green mist spilled out to roll down the stairs. The two who had been trying to get it open vanished into the mist still filling the room only to stagger out moments later coughing and choking. They stumbled down the stairs and headed to the rear door, now fully open. One looked at Warren with a mournful face and gave a slow shake of the head.
“Ok, now we gotta go,” Pham pulled at Warren’s arm. “That door’s only going to stay open until those whistles cut off. No idea how long that’ll be. Seconds, maybe.”
“Got it,” Warren acknowledged. “Go, I’ll see you on the other side.” Warren charged into the melee, creating space for his team. “Full retreat!” he shouted over the clash. “Let the red bastards take the hits, go for the door!”
Instead of the measured withdrawal, this time everyone disengaged as fast as they could and booked it for the far door. They still had to wend their way through some of the maze that remained and not a few of them bounced off the hot pipes, crying out or uttering censored swear words as their skin sizzled. The globlins started taking ground as the Travellers ran, trashing the mechanoids that still kept dropping from above and tearing through the pipes and cabinets as Warren chased the last of his crew through the maze to the door.
The interference of the mechanoids was enough to keep the Travellers ahead of the tide of globlins as they seemed more interested in levelling everything in the room. Killing the Travellers appeared to have become a secondary concern ever since the first brass whistle and Warren took advantage of that. Despite the pain in his feet he dashed for the door as fast as he could.
The pitch of the whistles that signalled that the door was open changed, dropping fast and he could see the door move. Pouring on every ounce of speed he could manage, Warren ran for his life. The door was already half closed as he reached it and he flung out an arm to arrest his speed and poivot around the heavy metal plate into the room beyond. The door gently kissed his back, knocking him to his knees where he stayed, panting in exhaustion.
“That went well,” he whispered, falling forward into darkness.