CWD: Sewer Skewers ~ Twenty-One

Nacho found their strange descent wildly concerning. Not only had they not been given a dungeon name, but the staircase seemed endless. Around and around they went, dashing from one side and easing down behind the sheet of mucky water until they were hidden from the buzzing menaces above. The monsters hadn’t been willing to come closer, but there was no reason to tempt fate.

Each time they passed under the waterfall, the water seemed hotter, which shouldn’t have been possible when the liquid was so far removed from its heat source. As an additional issue, the entirety of the boiling swamp seemed to be draining down into the staircase they found themselves in. The stream kept increasing in size, and soon rumblings that they were all going to drown were bouncing around the group.

“Can anyone think of something better?” Reuben tried to play games to keep them cheerful. “I still don’t care for the name ‘Succ'n'blow’. The Patrons could’ve done better. They could’ve gone with hemo-pyroes, flame-drains, or bloodblazers. Maybe one could be called FireToots McSquito. Nah… that sounds like a tween show.”

Nacho was glad for the extra Fitness points his food provided, since his mobile kitchen was neither light nor easy to balance. Every time he ducked under a waterfall, he worried that the pounding deluge might send him careening down into the darkness below. His Firefly Potstickers appeared to be waterproof—the first test had been exceedingly concerning—and they had a helpful tendency of flying to illuminate wherever he was looking.

They’d eventually gone so far underground that the top of the staircase was only a pinprick of light far, far above. After a few tense moments of scouting in the darkness, Scrubz called up from below. “There it is! I see the bottom. There’s a lot of water; ah man… this place is just going to be more swamp.”

So abruptly that a few people slipped and had to be caught, the System provided them with the name of the dungeon.

Greetings Player!

Welcome to the Best Barbeque Tunnels! We hope you have an appetite for destruction, because you’re about to get a bellyful of bad beasties! Prepare your eyes for the bloodbath of a lifetime! This is no shrimpy dungeon. It’s a big, spicy sausage of tricks and tunnels. Feel free to pig out!

Bonus offer! Stay in Active Combat for one hour straight and win ten thousand credits! Stay in Active Combat for two hours, and everyone in your group will win ten thousand credits each, and the highest damage dealer will also win a Weapon of Weaponing! Maximize your training experience through continual, exhausting combat!

Have fun, and as always… may your future be delicious!

They gathered at the bottom of the hole, where they stood in stinking black water up to their knees. The central chamber was a cacophony thanks to the waterfall, as well as numerous smaller trickles leaking down into the bottom of the staircase pit. Brie frowned and yelled over the noise, “If I have to fight in this muck, my abilities aren’t going to do us much good.”

“Let’s hope we can find some dry ground.” Nacho shifted his pack around on his shoulders.

Reuben, ever the font of wisdom, released his question as a shout. “What’s the difference between Kansas City barbeque and the rest of it? The sauce, right? I mean, everyone else is all about the dry rub or vinegar.”

“That has nothing to do with the situation at hand!” Taye called back, only for Reuben to shake his head.

“You’re missing the point. The ground isn’t vinegary, it’s saucy! That means we won’t sink as fast!” No one could make sense of the advice, which seemed to make Reuben frustrated beyond belief. “It’s a massive benefit! Why am I the only person that gets it?”

The Brunch Force soon left the main waterfall chamber and sloshed through a corridor into an open cavern where the water was a bit more shallow—only coming up to about mid-calf. Tunnels had been carved into the stone to the left and to the right. It was still loud in the cavern from the waterfall room, and the place stank of murky water and wet stone.

“Eduardo and I will run a little recon. You guys wait here.” Scrubz scowled at the plethora of options and motioned his team member forward. The two left through the passage to the right, and Nacho watched them go with complicated emotions filling him.

Kristie had a dizzy smile on her face. “Back to the discussion. I think barbeque is just… barbeque. Doesn’t matter where it’s from. That means Reuben should stop trying to get us to understand this and let it go. Right, Nacho?”

The cook hooked his thumbs into the straps of his heavy backpack and decided to try to end whatever… this was. “I think she’s right. It’s just a consistency thing. We’re just gonna be finding thick sauce, and the dungeon is gonna be heavy on the meat. Maybe extra-meaty, also known as healthy and hard to kill, monsters.”

“You’ve been a cook for like two minutes, and you’re forgetting I’ve known you your entire life,” Reuben replied righteously. “Before you got here, I’d only ever seen you eat pre-packaged meals or order from doordash. You can’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, because you have no idea.”

Everyone looked at Nacho, who shrugged helplessly. “He’s not wrong.”

“Oh, for celestial’s sake.” Brie cast around for anything she could use to get them off the topic. “There has to be a drain somewhere. The water is shallower in this room. Nacho, what did you think of the welcome message?”

“No, I think I’m starting to see what he’s getting at. I would have to guess that we’re going to be fighting giant shrimp, some kind of sausage creature, and pigs. That’s in line with the message, like you were mentioning, Brie. I’d imagine there will be dry tunnels at some point. We should try to stay in Active Combat as long as possible, all of us, to get whatever bonuses we can manage. That means highly focusing on your specializations. Reuben won’t fight, he’ll only heal. He’ll eventually run out Mana, so try not to get hit. Everyone else, make sure to listen to Brie when combat does start; we agreed that she's better at calling the shots than I am in that situation.”

“Full ride scholarship with lacrosse,” Reuben bragged on her behalf as he nudged Taye. “You even know what that sport is, kid?”

“No.” The Archer’s blunt answer took some of the wind out of Reuben’s sails.

Before the Healer could educate Taye, Scrubz came sloshing back into the room with Eduardo, clapping his hands sardonically. “Thanks, boss. ‘Try not to get wounded by the pig monsters’; great advice. Couldn’t have thought that one up myself. Listen up: the tunnel to the right is a dead end. We’ll want to go through the tunnel to the left. That’s probably where the monsters are.”

“I hope there are pigs.” Reuben smacked his lips loudly. “Pigs means bacon. I haven’t had bacon in a lo~ong time.”

“Bacon would be too hard to eat during combat.” Brie took off her helmet and tucked it under her arm. It was hot and humid in the tunnels, thanks to the previously boiling water. Nacho didn’t want to get sidetracked into a bacon discussion, and apparently neither did Brie. “Scrubz, as an unbiased source, do you think we should try for the credits and the Weapon of Weaponry?”

The unknown-classed-grump nodded instantly. “Yeah. I mean, we’re down here anyway. Two hours of Active Combat is going to be brutal, though.”

“It is, and we don’t need to do it,” Nacho agreed, deciding to take control of the conversation. “Once we start, we’ll cycle fresh warriors up to the front line and bring the tired ones back to catch their breath. We have to keep moving the entire time. We’ll have an alpha team, led by Brie, who will engage the first line of monsters. The beta team, led by Abby, will charge forward once those initial monsters are killed. I’ll keep everyone fed; I have a recipe for peanut butter balls I can cook up if we need them.”

“You meant to tell me that we're gonna fight while you just… cook?” Scrubz must have been practicing his sneer, judging by how good he was getting at it.

“Brie hits things. You?” Nacho shot him with a finger gun, which turned into a ‘who knows’ gesture, then he pointed around the group. “Reuben heals. Taye shoots. I feed people so that they can use their skills for the required two full hours of combat. Get that chip off your shoulder. On that note, does anyone else have a healing ability?”

“Only our natural Regen,” Taye stated with a wince, as everyone else made agreeing noises. “Which… won’t be working.”

“Correct. Got that, Scrubz?” Nacho got a few chuckles at that, and the tension dropped a notch. He knew that not getting a break to heal made this dungeon run all the more dangerous, and they needed to be ready for it. “If anyone gets too hurt and they don’t get back to Reuben for Healing Hugs, they are not to continue into combat. The bonuses aren't worth anyone dying during this dungeon run. Agreed?”

Scrubz still kept his sword sheathed as though it was a weapon of last resort instead of an item he needed ready at all times down here. “Fine. Me and Eduardo will lead the gamma team. Alpha, beta, gamma, like the frat houses, right?”

Nacho winced, then reluctantly nodded. “That’s… like the Greek alphabet, but, yes.”

“Eduardo’s going to chonk it up on gamma.” Reuben’s face glowed with a smile. “Now, that’s a good tagline. Eduardo, how about you wear the Ring of Cheese if you’re gonna take my role as a tank? Scrubz, you can wear my gauntlets if you want.”

Reuben handed Eduardo the ring, but when the guy tried it on, he shook his head. “No, the System says it’s yours, and you’d have to transfer it over to me permanently, and it wouldn’t work for you anymore. Thanks for the offer, though.”

Nacho had figured that would happen. There were some magic items that could be used by multiple people at once, but once a player claimed an item, it was almost always exclusively theirs until they gave it up forever or Tiered up and handed it off to someone else.

Scrubz tried the gauntlets, looking dejected when they didn’t work. “I really hoped I could use these.”

“It’s okay, Scrubz. We’ll find you a super cool item down here in the Barbeque Tunnels,” Reuben promised with a manly arm slap. “Don’t you worry one bit.”

Ever insightful, Taye asked the question that had been plaguing Nacho. “What’s the verdict? Are the Barbeque Tunnels part of the UnderFun?”

Nacho swished his leg through the water and let out a deep groan. “I don’t think so, but I’m hoping they lead to the UnderFun. We are deep, and this feels right. But we won’t know until we run through ‘em.”

“So let’s get running,” Scrubz offered, making Nacho tense once more. Scrubz volunteering for work felt… unnatural.

Kristie's eyes glowed a light pink. “Hold up, Scrubz. I’m checking on potions that might give us Mana, since it’s going to be an issue once we start. Us spellcasters can drink water and Juxta-ade, or root beer if you’re Reuben, but we won’t have a way of regenerating our Mana.”

Nacho knew what she would find and hid a grin as her eyes lit up when she found the item… then the shift into horror when she read the associated cost.

“Ouch!” The pink Warlock winced. “The Mana Potions are crazy expensive, but they’re not a class item. Guys… it takes a thousand credits to restore ten points of Mana. I don’t think we should buy them. I guess for this dungeon run, we’ll have to rely on our Body Players.”

Kristie and Hazel, as well as some of the other spellcasters of the group, had a mixture of relief and disappointment on their faces.

Brie didn’t spare the shirkers a glance. She simply motioned everyone forward, taking the alpha team through the left tunnel. To everyone's relief they soon encountered a ledge that allowed them to escape the water. It was a good thing. Almost at the same time, Tier zero shrimp monsters came splashing up at them, a hefty number of them in this colony alone.

Nacho was up front, just behind the main row of fighters as the grind began.

Hey, Player, welcome to Active Combat! We’ll run a timer on you, since the Barbeque Tunnels have their own special specialness. No Store access and no Regens. Better be packing a Healer! If you didn’t buy the Potions of Mana Replenishment, it’s too late now!

“Ignore the message; they’re just messing with us,” Nacho informed a crestfallen Kristie. He and Reuben scrambled onto the ledge, and Nacho dropped his pack. He raised his cleaver and his skillet slightly just in case any of the monsters thought that the cook would be an easier target. Abby and the beta team stood back, taking pot shots at monsters but letting Brie and the alpha team do most of the killing.

The shrimp monsters looked like classic shrimp, except that their legs were far longer, and they wore steel boots with spiked toes and hooked heels. Their antennae acted like whips.

A System View of them showed that they were referred to as ‘Ironically Booted Shrimp’, or IBS. In Nacho’s mind, that took them off the menu. That practically shouted that they would make the team sick, no matter how he cooked them.

Brie used her Defensive Whirl and Combat Dash liberally, because these things were only Tier zero and she had two other teams to relieve her. With no Mana requirement, she could simply eat and be combat effective again in moments. Still, two hours of Active Combat was going to be a grind. While Brie smashed, one of the other guys Scrubz had suggested backed her up with his bow.

Nacho decided to take the opportunity to look the other party members over. It was hard to ignore them for so long, and it was important to have a good relationship when they were going to be in close contact for a long time. Alonzo was an older bald guy, a standard Warrior, who was proving without a doubt that he wasn’t a very good shot, though he was pretty good with his mass-produced Costco-branded sword. Linda was a spellcaster that helped out the alpha team. She threw standard blue magic missiles when the occasional monster was tough to take down, but knowing that there was no way to regenerate the Mana she was using, she didn’t cast too many of them.

That was the main drawback of that class archetype. Spellcasters could drink water to get their Thirst levels up, but with every spell, they were using precious Mana that couldn’t be replenished until combat ended—at least without potions. Nacho winced and glared when a Warrior got slashed by a giant shrimp antennae. The man tottered back to Reuben, who healed him with a single hug.

Reuben had thirty-one Mana Points, and every heal would take away ten percent of his total Mana. That meant he could only take care of nine major wounds, and they were already down one with combat barely started. That was the bad news. The good news? He was replenishing a whopping forty Health with each hug.

The sounds of the battle were fierce, so Nacho had to yell above the din. “Reuben, most of our people only have around thirty Health, and I hate saying this, but we’re going to have to wait until they’re seriously hurt to heal them. You only have a few heals left. We need to make them count.”

“No Positive Vibes for these bros,” Reuben sighed dramatically and seemed to be contemplating something. “Is this worth it? The bonus?”

“For the credits? Maybe not. But for this weapon…? Maybe. Depending on what it is. We’ve all seen how important base damage is. It's why Brie’s not leveling yet. Buying something enchanted enough to replace it is gonna be rough.” Nacho spotted the pink blur of a shrimp swimming through the water, and before he knew it, he’d slammed a cleaver into the creature’s head as it launched itself out of the water. Twice. His whack-whack combo, thanks to the HungerCry knives magic, hit with eight damage each. “Feisty little guy, aren’t you?”

Damage Dealt: 16/26!

Brie only had to hit them twice to fully end them, inadvertently showcasing how important Skills like Positive Vibes and Combat Dash were. Without them, she was only doing twenty-three points of damage, and that was mostly because of the extra ninety percent that was added to her Fitness from eating more of Nacho’s upgraded oatmeal. Nacho was grateful that her total Health was at sixty-four because of the tweak to her Fitness, but was it going to be possible to keep this up for two hours? Even he was already having second thoughts.

When Abby and Taye led the beta team through to wipe out the last of the shrimp, they splashed onward to fight the next batch of baddies: Burnt Enders.

Abby headed the assault by bashing through cubed meat that was smoking and sending intermittent blasts of flame at them. Taye used an exploding arrow and got lucky enough to land it among a huge group that was attempting to attack, scattering shredded beef across the area.

Reuben focused on running triage, asking people how much Health they had—what their maximum was, and where they would be once Nacho’s Cooking Magic wore off. A few people had lost half their Health, but a single reminder from Nacho was all it took to make Reuben hold off on healing them in case someone needed the help more than they did in the near future.

Meanwhile, Nacho checked through his store of leftovers—he already knew he was going to have to make the Peanut Butter Power Breakfast Ball recipe during combat. It wouldn’t be cooking exactly; just mixing the ingredients and rolling them up. Essentially, he was going to combine partial preexisting portions to a higher efficiency. “Ugh… gonna have to buy some Store hand sanitizer. My hands are gross with the filthy—abyss, no Store access in combat. Good thing my hands are perfectly clean. Hear that, anyone that’s listening in? Perfectly clean.”

Once the beta team had wiped out most of the Burnt Enders, the gamma team hurried forward to act as cleanup. Before long, they moved into the next room where they engaged the hardest of the monsters so far: big boar men with crimson necks, wearing overalls and wielding rusted cleavers. They had vicious tusks, and while they stood on their hind legs, they were definitely more pig than man.

Someone claimed they were called Pigbillies, sending Reuben into near-hysterical laughter as Nacho sloshed into the chamber to watch the gamma team fight.

Scrubz immediately threw his spear, opting to use that over pulling out his sword. He found a patch of dry ground and got into position, hurling kicks and punches with abandon. Nacho took the opportunity to scan the chamber, noting that this cave offered piles of dirt and sand for them to fight on. Scrubz and his Cocktail Party took advantage of the high ground right away, and it was lucky they did.

The Pigbillies were Tier one monsters with low Health, so they weren’t impossible to hit, just difficult. Scrubz quickly found that he could do more damage with his kicks than his fists, so he stopped throwing punches and focused on his feet. He moved through a surprising variety of kicks—ax, front, roundhouse, and others Nacho didn’t have proper names for.

The cook did have to laugh as one thing became abundantly clear: Scrubz was a Warrior, but he must’ve been majorly into martial arts in his prior life in order to earn passive Skills in punching and kicking. In essence… he was a Monk, and Nacho was dying to use this knowledge to tease him relentlessly as needed. When Scrubz’s foot struck a boar man, it resulted in an explosion of golden light, and the pig guy’s head crumpled like a ball of wet paper towels.

Hazel, seemingly more of a support than anything else, tossed her shields up to protect Hank and some others while they fought the Pigbillies.

In the meantime, Nacho found a relatively secluded corner of dirt in the cavern and set up his mobile kitchen, setting to work on his peanut butter balls as he kept one eye focused on the aggressive creatures. He couldn’t believe that he was able to calmly open up his cookbook and go through the recipes in the middle of a battle sequence.

Everyone else would fight, and Nacho would cook. Scrubz hadn’t been wrong about how this would go; he was just a jerk.

The cook went over the ingredients, pulling them out one by one as he prepared everything that he needed. The most important step to take to boost a dish into a higher Rarity was to use a better material for at least the main ingredient, he was almost sure of it. In this case, he chose his secret stash of Rare chocolate chips. They were usually his secret vice, and he would regularly sneak a handful when no one was looking. For the sake of survival, he decided he would share today.

The cavern echoed with spell explosions, people screaming for the Healer, pigs squealing in either rage or pain—it was total chaos. Then there was Nacho, hunkered down in a far corner, humming a tune and mixing ingredients, then rolling them into perfectly shaped balls. He added in his Cooking Magic to give them all a forty-five percent bonus to their stats, almost instantly finding himself running into the Mana problem. His Cooking Magic required ten percent of his Mana, as well as ten percent of his Hunger and Thirst Points.

They had food and water, but just like everyone else, he couldn’t restore his Mana. Brie and the alpha team sprinted in just as he finished a round, grabbed the peanut butter balls that were settling in place, and chewed almost the instant the food was past their teeth. Brie gave him a friendly pat as she moved past him. “Those are good, but you used another ingredient that’s hard to eat during combat—peanut butter is dry and sticks in your throat.”

“Noted.” Nacho couldn’t keep the exasperation out of his voice, but she only chuckled at him.

“I know you’ll eventually figure something out.” She strode back into the fray as the biggest of the boar men advanced with a giant machete-like butcher knife. “Looks like in the land of pigs, the butcher is king.”

Brie Combat Dashed forward and slammed her hammer right into the pig man’s face. A glance at the timer informed Nacho that it had already been thirty minutes of constant fighting.

“We have a long hour and a half remaining to clear the rewards.” He got back to work, grimly promising his team, “I’ll make sure we don’t need to do it on an empty stomach.”