James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords: Chapter 12 - Room Service
🕑 Added 2022-07-29 22:00:04 +0000 UTCOnce they had dispatched the dog-skull women—which Griff called banshee handmaidens—they spent a few seconds discussing the benefits versus the risks of taking the elevator. In the end, they decided to roll the dice. The banshee’s had used the car, after all, so it was serviceable and the idea of skipping floors was extremely appealing—especially since they had a lot of ground to cover and not much time to do it in.
The car’s cables weren’t immediately cut loose, plunging them to their deaths, and nothing leapt down through the trap door in the ceiling to slaughter or torch them alive in the enclosed space. The elevator did stop unbidden on the second floor, though, opening on a group of floating treelike creatures that buzzed with swarms of insects.
Joe was the first to react. “My time has come. Chonk! Bertha! Let’s shine!”
The mechanical coon leapt into action with a battle cry, scampering onto a lumbering tree. His mini hedge trimmer screamed, and leaves and twigs flew. The tree spun and stumbled to the side, swiping at its canopy, frantically trying to get at the creature scrambling from branch to branch.
Joe wasn’t far behind. He lunged into the fray, saw revving. Woodchips and sawdust rooster-tailed over his shoulder as whole limbs went somersaulting through the air.
“Do what you were born to do, Bertha! Dance, my love! Dance!”
Unfortunately, cutting off a branch or two didn’t kill the tree creatures outright, and the noise seemed to be drawing hordes of their minions—sentient brambles, mushrooms, and weeds. Joe was about to be overwhelmed, but Clay, Alex and Griff couldn’t fire without potentially hitting him.
With a curse, Alex let her shotgun drop on its sling and pulled out her kusarigama. She darted off the elevator, avoiding a wild overhand swing of Bertha, and started chopping and bashing. She didn’t really have the tool for the job, but with her drastically modified strength, that didn’t seem to matter a whole helluva lot. She whipped the kusarigama around in a vicious arc, stomping on the chain to amp up the momentum. Every time the spiked head made contact, woody trunks and mushroom caps exploded. It was like watching someone fire a cannon ball into a forest at point blank range. Damned impressive.
Alex and Joe fought back-to-back in front of the elevator doors, the reach of their weapons pushing the floating tree things back just far enough that all Clay could see of them was twigs. He grunted in frustration. Unlike the other two, he didn’t have superhuman levels of strength and he also didn’t have a clear shot. He had a gun and that Wand of Inferno, both of which could easily kill his wife or his brother if his aim wasn’t perfect or if they unknowingly moved the wrong way.
Ducking under the whirling flail of Alex’s kusarigama, Clay slipped behind her tiny frame and pulled out the Wand of Inferno.
“Right behind you!” he called out.
Alex helpfully moved the swinging flail to her opposite side. Clay reached the wand over her shoulder and fired off the first of his eight daily Inferno Lances.
The dark, overgrown hallway flared like burning thermite as a javelin of white-hot flame, as thick as his wrist, exploded from the wand. A tree creature threw a green ball of light that buzzed like a swarm of killer bees, but Alex whipped the flail at the ball, knocking it back. The buzzing orb slammed into the spell-hurling tree and erupted with a boom that shook the foundations of the hotel.
Ash drifted through the burning hallway—all that was left of the tree creatures. Clay spun around to help Joe, but found his brother standing in a sea of dead wood.
Joe nodded. “This is the life, Bertha. You, me, and all the firewood we can eat.”
Griff stepped off the elevator just before the doors sliced closed. Literally sliced. Clay saw a blade pass through the center panel, like it was hoping to chop off any hand that tried to hold the doors open.
“The light for the ninth floor lit up,” Griff explained, nodding at the elevator. “I figure Katotes knows we’re running roughshod over his lower levels and is waiting up there to surprise us.”
“Which means we need another way in,” Clay muttered.
“We could still take the stairs.” Alex pointed at a sign with a fire symbol on it and a stick man running down the stairs.
Griff’s lone eye shined in the firelight from the inferno. “Prob’ly our only option, though they’re gonna be trapped to the gills if Katotes is worth his salt as a dungeon lord.”
After a quick check to make sure everybody was in operating condition, they picked their way through Joe’s woodpile searching for any loot the creatures may have dropped. They turned up a handful of potions, a small leather pouch filled with golden coins, and a pair of Filson heavy-duty, oil finish, double-tin chaps with a pair of attached suspenders. Woodcutter’s Leggings. They granted the wearer a +15% resistance against slashing and piercing damage, and the flavor text read: Surprisingly breathable.
“I think the universe has spoken against the jorts,” Clay said, tossing the pants over to his brother.
Joe eyed them suspiciously for a second, then brightened as he slid the jorts off and pulled the tin-pants on. “Wow, those aresurprisingly breathable!”
Freshly equipped, they headed down a dark hallway, Clay first since none of his weapons could be used for meleeing. Alex and Joe stayed in the middle, and Griff watched their back with a plasma ball at the ready.
A room service cart sat forgotten in the hall, probably there since the Merge.
Clay stuck out a boot to nudge it out of the way.
Naturally, the cart roared and hinged in half, a tooth-studded maw chomping at him. Clay blasted the thing with his M4, putting three rounds in its center. The cart acted like it hadn’t felt a thing. Its huge jaws clamped down over Clay’s leg and shook like a pit bull trying to rip meat off a gristly bone. The teeth slashed through fabric and skin, sinking into the muscle below. Pain flooded through Clay’s body, and white stars danced across his vision as the creature whipped its head around, shaking Clay like a ragdoll.
Both Joe and Alex charged in, trying to stop the thing from tearing him apart, but they weren’t having much success.
“Look out!” Griff shouted.
Glass shattered and a green flash of light and smoke puffed in the cart’s chewing jaws.
With a shriek, it dropped Clay and started gagging.
“It’s a mimic, weak to poison,” the old weed yelled over the din of battle. “Stab it with that hacky thing you’ve got, lass. That’ll help us kill it faster.”
Alex hopped over Clay’s bleeding and mangled leg. Before the slavering room service cart could spin and attack her, she ran up the wall and launched herself off, dropping behind the mimic. The flail end whistled through the air and clanged off the cart’s side. With her new and improved strength, the spiked head of the kusarigama landed like a sledgehammer, leaving an enormous dent in the center.
“Sweet leg wound, bro.” Joe knelt beside Clay. “Maybe you should’ve kept these fancy pants for yourself.”
“Shut up and give me a potion,” Clay grunted, his vision swimming from the pain.
Joe forked over a flask. Clay bolted it in a single gulp and grimaced as muscle and skin mended itself. The sensation was godawful, but the sharp relief from the pain was welcome.
Meanwhile, Alex danced through a series of lighting fast cat and crane stances, narrowly avoiding the mimic’s chomping mouth, and striking in retaliation. Griff blasted the mimic with another poison ball the second he got an opening. Towels and little bottles of shampoo went flying. The flail smashed down on the cart’s top shelf with a satisfying crunch. With a last gurgling rumble, the cart gave up the ghost, its jaws dropping back together cock-eyed.
Alex sighed and relaxed her fighting stance.
“No more touching random furniture,” she told Clay.
He huffed a laugh as he pushed himself to his newly healed feet.
“No arguments here.” He tugged at the bloody, tore-up pants leg. “Thank God almighty it didn’t go much higher or I would’ve ended up in jorts.”
“Hey! Jorts are cool.”
“No. No they’re not,” Clay said flatly.
Miraculously, they made it to the fire door at the end of the hall without further assault.
“Best let me go first here.” Griff stepped forward and rested a hand on the handle. “This is the sort of place Dungeon Lords were always laying traps back home.”
Griff checked constantly for tripwires and tested every stair and landing before setting his full weight on them. They’d barely made it a full flight when one of the steps dropped out from beneath the old-timer’s boot. Clay grabbed him and jerked him back onto the solid steps.
Another floor up, a set of swinging scythes dropped down from the landing overhead, the blades’ timing offset so they couldn’t just run through. Luckily, the stairwell was a fairly small one, with a center drop just three feet wide. Clay, Joe, and Griff climbed across the gap and up to the stairs above the trapped landing easily enough, then gave Alex a hand across, since her legs were too short to reach—a fact that Joe didn’t fail to mention.
“What we should’ve done is fashioned you a little papoose,” he said. “Then you could’ve ridden into battle on Clay’s back, like me and Chonk.”
“You know I have enough strength now to knock you down the stairs, right?” she said.
Joe’s laugh bounced around the stairwell. “I’m just brainstorming for efficiency, short stack. Don’t hate the inventor, hate the game.”
Between the seventh and eighth floor, everything went dark, all the skylights and windows blacked out at once. A strange cackling erupted, accompanied by a sawing sound oddly similar to Bertha’s bounced off the concrete and metal in an ear-piercing cacophony.
“Orclings!” Griff thundered. “Get down unless you have dark vision!”
Clay dropped to a crouch and felt Alex do the same a half-step behind him.
Up ahead, Griff’s eye glowed bright yellow, then suddenly, he was whipping that glowing Blood-Quenched Dagger around. Red contrails flashed along behind it like a glowstick at a rave. The cackling quickly turned to inhuman screams, then morphed into tense silence.
Light returned to the stairwell revealing lumpy, misshapen creatures with tusks protruding from their bottom jaw and huge batlike ears too large for their heads. Clay and the others had to pick their way through the corpses.
“Check it out,” Joe said, kicking one of the Orcling’s weapons with the toe of his boot. “One of those electric turkey knives. Think they’re into cooking?”
“I think they’re into carving,” Alex said.
“Stick close,” Griff warned. “Don’t know how fast these traps reset.”
Strangely, nothing jumped out at them and no traps were sprung as they climbed the last set of stairs to the ninth floor.
“Is that it?” Clay asked in a low voice.
“You wanted more?” Alex asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“I meant it like ‘Was that all of the traps?’ I was wondering if we’d made it through or there’ll be more ahead.”
Griff inspected the last stair, then stepped onto the landing facing the door marked 9th Floor – Concierge Level.
“No,” the old-timer said, hocking a wad of phlegm and spitting it down the center of the stairwell. “Nothing left now but him.”
A hush fell over the party. This was the last door between them and the dungeon lord. They could get everything they’d been hoping for, or they could wind up dead. Once they crossed that threshold, the odds swung overwhelmingly in favor of dying.
Clay and Alex’s eyes met. Clay nodded. He knew that look. She wasn’t about to back down any more than he was.
“What’s everybody standing around for?” Joe said, squeezing his way through to the landing, shunting Griff out of the way. He gave Chonk a loving pat—“Hang on tight, little buddy”—then leaned back and launched a Warbooted foot at the door.
“Yeehaw! Ready to get your ass kicked, Katote?”
