Chương 359: Book Eight, Chapter 26: Dungeon Clearing

As much freedom as we had found at Kimberly's loft, it could never make up for what we had lost when we could no longer call Camp Dyer home. The open spaces, the views of nature, the distance from town, the feeling of safety you got from knowing that there were a hundred other players there with you at any time, ready to come to your aid or, at the very least, go through hell with you… that was hard to do without. But Halle's Castle was a step back in the right direction. We had enough players there for four teams.

The place was neither packed like the loft nor deserted. Sure, since the apocalypse was going on, we were a bit on edge, walking the walls by habit to make sure there were no beasties or murderers about to climb over. But in the weeks since we had made the castle our home, that had slowed down. All those monsters that ran from the apocalypse had either found places to hide while they waited it out or had killed each other.

The point was, things felt safer, and not just because we had gotten used to the presence of danger. The radio reports from inside the circus were nuts to listen to. On the surface, they sounded like advertisements for different acts, but, being that this was Carousel, some of them were odd, others were quite troubling. There had been a trapeze act where a loose bolt had led to some untimely falls without a net, and it just so happened that the audio of all that was picked up really well.

We had to switch the radio off after that. Still, the large rooms and winding corridors of the castle made the danger feel distant. Except, of course, for when the power went out. There wasn't a lot of natural light inside, and even though we told ourselves that getting the electricity back on wasn't worth fighting against random goblins and other dungeon dwellers, we quickly learned how important basic lighting was for our mental health—and refrigeration.

That was important to me because, as usual, my breakfast was cereal. I sat at the long table in the dining room, eating a bowl and slowly coming to the realization that even if we had enough milk to last out the apocalypse, it still wouldn't work out because milk was perishable. We hadn't thought to get powdered milk, and even if we had, how would that taste in cereal? Whatever the case, I knew suffering was coming soon.

People filtered in and out of the kitchens, fixing themselves breakfast and occasionally cleaning up afterward. We really needed an Adeline who could keep people in line with basic chores, but we didn't have one, so we traded chores like valuable collector cards. Camden ate toast while examining the Atlas." Killers Rowe is actually a pun," Camden said.

"It's not just as in, like, the row of killers. It's because there are multiple killers in the Rowe family."

"So little Caleb is just lonely out there," I said.

"Mom and Dad away at the circus, and he's left to fend for himself with his sword."

"Something like that," he said.

"I am so tempted to just look up the spoilers. What are the odds that we ever end up doing that storyline?"

"This is how it starts," I said.

"This is how you wind up being spoiled to every major storyline and not able to level up."

"I could stop anytime I wanted to," he said. We had to put our conversation on hold because the circus radio playing in the kitchen suddenly cut out, along with all of the lights.

"That's not so bad," Camden said.

"What was that… six days?"

"Five and a half," I said.

"You got the cameras working, right?"

"Of course I did," he said.

"This is Carousel. All you have to do is make sure the wires plug into the right hole, and it'll work." One thing we had noticed when we were at Eternal Savers Club was the extensive home security cameras available. They were a bit out of date, but fortunately, by movie logic, they would be just fine. The footage would be a bit blurry. Oh well. We got up from the table and made our way to the wine cellar. Somehow, we had been beaten there by Michael and Antoine.

Lorne, the Bully-Bruiser from Nicole's team, showed up just after us, along with his teammate Kelsey, the Final Girl who dressed like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That was our party. We decided to do this particular chore in shifts, except for Camden, who would always go because he had a particular set of skills that made him invaluable, which was to say that he had the Battlefield Intuition trope. It allowed him to use his Savvy to predict the tactics enemies would use, which proved invaluable in the dungeons.

Michael also went on every run, but only because he wanted the fight.

"Better to rip it off like a bandage," Michael said. He had been saying that a lot, especially when people started talking about just waiting for the dungeons to clear themselves, which they allegedly would, according to Avery's writ. Camden made his way to the shelf where he had put some monitors for his security system. With the flick of a switch, he was able to get his cameras and those monitors back online from battery backup.

How he knew how to do that, well, he just plugged it in and said that's what he was doing, and it worked. It looked like he had incorporated a car battery into the mix. It was exactly what you would expect to see on a TV show for such a setup. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"All right," he said as he looked at the screen.

"We've got the knight in shining armor. I knew he'd be back. Riley says not to look inside the armor, right?"

"That's right," I said. We had seen this guy before; he was some type of ghost or enchanted armor or something that wanted to steal your soul. While I couldn't always see the tropes of monsters and other enemies outside of storylines, because they didn't apply outside of storylines, I could see a few. Combine that with Camden's trope, and we figured him out real quick. The fact that he was called Dark Knight of the Soul on the red wallpaper was also an important clue.

"Science zombies coming from Halle's lab," Camden said after a few more glances around the various camera views, "and we've got a slime. The way it's not moving, I think that's one of the exploding ones." Sometimes you could see creatures on the red wallpaper when you saw videos of them, but that wasn't always true. Either way, we were prepared. This was a basic hack-and-slash operation or, in my case, snip-and-trim because I was using my hedge clippers with the Sha-Shing trope.

As goofy as I looked, they were super effective in close combat. I also brought my knife made of silver that I had melted down from a spoon. Its trope was called Selective Sharpness, which prevented me from accidentally cutting myself. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

"Antoine, Michael, take the lead," Camden said.

"Kelsey, you're in the middle with that spear. Riley and I will be just behind you, with Lorne behind us covering our rear." Camden quickly enabled the mechanism to open up the secret entrance in the wall, and we made entry.

"First room clear," Antoine said as we walked into the dungeon. We proceeded, all of us holding some form of weapon, ready for a fight. Most of them were the rusted weapons we had picked up from inside the dungeon itself. For lighting, Camden and Kelsey carried old-fashioned torches.

"Second room. We've got zombies ahead," Antoine said. They were the dehydrated zombies that Doctor Halle had reanimated, and they had one major weakness. Camden stepped up with a bottle of lighter fluid and quickly squirted the oncoming zombies, not that he really needed to, because as soon as he held his torch up to the belt pouch that one of the zombies was wearing, their dirty white button-up shirt lit aflame, and so did the rest of them shortly after.

Another touch of the torch to the other zombie, and soon she started to burn up like an old dead pine tree. They had the Black Magic Reanimation trope, which made it so that even if you hacked them into pieces, they would still be alive, or undead, whatever the right term was. You had to burn them all to get them to stop moving.

"Spider at ten o'clock," I said. Spiders only attacked from the ceiling, which made sense for a movie or a video game. Another squirt of lighter fluid and a torch took care of the web and any baby spiders that might have been lurking, but Michael had to hack the mommy spider to death with his sword because the fire only made her angry.

"Room is clear," Antoine said. So we proceeded to the final room, where we could simply flip a switch and then go home. But our knight in shining armor was waiting for us. Michael had a shield, and our first move was always just to get that knight off his feet because he was clumsy. Not that I was judging. I had never personally attempted to possess a suit of armor.

The clumsiness was largely for show, as if to give a brief respite to a weary adventurer before it was revealed that the knight could reassemble itself and float in the process, yet not exactly fly. Whatever the case, Michael and Antoine were able to beat the knight back.

"Exploding slime near the right doorway," Camden said.

"It's got some sort of trap tactic. I don't know if that's the explosion itself or what." The other slimes we had dealt with, you just cut them in half or burst them after a few strikes, then they would turn into a puddle before reforming later. The exploding ones, well, their gimmick was self-explanatory. Luckily, they were a lot more lethargic. This one kind of looked like a gummy bear that had really let itself go and was lying there watching us. Camden moved to flip the switch and get our power back on.

He took a few more moments to examine the breaker system. He had spoken about rigging up some ropes to be able to flip the breakers from a distance. Everything was going according to plan. Kelsey and I were stabbing one of the non-exploding slimes to death, and Lorne barely had to do anything. His entire job was to watch our backs and our exit, not to get aggressive. But of course, nothing could ever be too easy.

A small herd of zombies, the same kind we had just dealt with, revealed themselves, coming from the second doorway on the right. They could only be dangerous in numbers, so while Camden was preoccupied, Michael broke away from the knight that Antoine and he had practically disassembled and started chopping zombies off at the legs. They weren't the contagious kind, so mostly they were filler enemies. In addition to her spear, Kelsey also had a torch, and after the zombies started to pile up, she lit them on fire.

It wasn't as easy as it would have been if Camden had spritzed them with lighter fluid, but they ignited soon enough. Unfortunately, not all of them had been cut off at the knees. They were all falling on top of each other and crowding in. They were igniting each other. The fire was really spreading, and the zombies were still spilling out of the doorway. That's when I realized the problem.

"Explosion!" I screamed. Unfortunately, I saw it coming a few seconds before it was obvious what was happening, so when everyone stopped what they were doing and looked to the exploding slime, they hadn't realized what I had realized, which was that the flaming zombies, which were now struggling to climb over the piles of themselves, were soon going to make contact with the exploding slime. We had seconds.

"This way!" Michael said, pulling Kelsey and me through the doorway furthest on the right. The others found their own ways to protect themselves, but sure enough, I was right. Before any of us could stop what was about to happen, one ignited zombie arm fell onto the lazy little slime near the doorway we had just gone through. Moments later, the explosion was deafening, but Michael, Kelsey, and I were safe behind a wall.

"Is everyone okay?" I heard Camden calling out. We called out the roll as the smoke cleared, but before we could re-enter the room we just jumped out of, the door slammed shut from above. It had been suspended by a rope that was tied off, but that rope had been cut in two by the exploding slime, and now we were separated from the others by a heavy door. Kelsey waved her torch around, looking at the room we were in, and it was a pretty bad deal.

While those dehydrated zombies from Doctor Halle's experiments did exist in the dungeons, they were not the only kind down there. The classic kind also existed—the wet and juicy disease-bearing kind that liked to bite. There were four of them in the room with us, and they seemed to wake up with the explosion. They were picking themselves up off the ground and moaning aggressively at us. Around the corner, more zombies began to moan—too many more. Their levels were lower than ours, but that was no problem for them.

Zombies didn't need Moxie or Savvy. They just needed a strong bite and high numbers. And we must have looked awfully tasty.