CWD: Sewer Skewers ~ Fourteen

Bright and early the next morning, Nacho, Reuben, and Brie were tromping down the Bove Road—the new name for their burgeoning superhighway. The cook had been opposed to the title at first, because of how many lives had already been lost to that monster, but he eventually came around as increasing numbers of guild members explained that they wanted a reminder of their first big win in this world.

Taye was with them, still decked out in his old armor and wielding his old bow—for now. Last night a large group of people, including Gabe the Archer, came to The Dinner Party and told them that Taye should have the Robbin’ Hoodie set items. They had good reasoning, which boiled down to the fact that Taye had been important to Armor Mountain since the very beginning. The Archer was touched beyond words at the gesture, and even now, he was quietly contemplative about the situation.

The young man walked a bit behind Nacho, Reuben, and Brie, along with about three dozen other guild members who had volunteered to come along to help. Many would be following the latest caravan of wagons back to Armor Mountain to make sure no one tried to raid what they looted from the subterranean Costco. Since Abby and Kristie would be going with Nacho, the caravan would need the extra protection.

To that point, there had been only a few bandit attacks, partly because Nacho required the guards to throw Juxtaposition tarps over the wagons. The tarps were particularly obnoxious—bright yellow, kind of water resistant but not actually waterproof, as well as being stamped with the official motto of the Juxtaposition ‘May your future be delicious’ in red across the front. The covers made spotting the wagons easy, but they also obscured the looted goods and made it impossible to tell the value of the contents.

Bills Old and Young were walking with the other guild members behind them. While the Bills had been civil last night, that civility had melted into thin air when the decision was made to give Taye the Robbin’ Hoodie Archer Pack. Both thought it wasn’t fair, even though Taye was three levels above the nearest archer—and frankly, Taye was the best of them.

Nacho planned on raising Taye, Reuben, and Brie all to Tier one before they found the UnderFun. Between Brie and Reuben, they had the melee combat covered for the time being, so they needed to focus on cultivating some missile support. Having a Tier one archer with Tier one magical archery equipment would only help them.

The lad in question wandered a bit behind them, which allowed Nacho to talk to his closest friends in privacy.

“Just making sure we’re going to upgrade Brie next.” Reuben tossed out the assertion as they tromped across the tracks the wagons had dug into the soft ground.

“I don’t know about that, guys. Tiering up means I’ll lose my hammer, and it already lets me hit higher than I should. Maybe we wait on boosting me?” Brie dramatically tossed the weapon into the air and caught it with a sound like a baseball hitting a glove. “What about your knives? Can you still use them?”

“They’re… special. I can upgrade them, and I get to choose a new option for them, but I haven’t decided what I want them to do yet.” Nacho had to stop before he said too much in public. He wasn’t decked out in his new armor, which was well on the ridiculous side for appearance. Until he needed it, he’d keep it in a Storage Slot. On a happy note, because it was a set item, it all fit in a single Slot. That had been a particularly nice benefit he had never been able to learn of in his past.

There was another reason he paused, though. He hadn’t yet explained the embarrassingly large backpack he had brought along. While he might look odd, he was already in love with his mobile kitchen. Nacho had spent most of the night trying to figure out all the little options, but he was sure it would still surprise him in the future.

Inside the capacious backpack, he had discovered special compartments for his cutting board, a whole array of spices, and his cooking utensils. If that wasn’t cool enough, it included a system of magically enhanced poles and canvas hardened into what felt like particle board covered with linoleum. With a flick of a few of the poles, he could turn the backpack into a table almost instantly. When it came to meal prep, nothing helped quite like a flat surface.

Nacho didn’t keep his Aria in the backpack, of course. No, he used a whole Storage Slot for his precious kitchen-friendly grimoire instead. If anything happened to it, he would lose access to all of the recipes he’d gathered so far. The additions included three full cookbooks and his venison recipe. The book was the single most expensive item he owned at this point, and it would become worth more as time went on.

He adjusted a strap, and his entire pack swayed, nearly knocking him over and earning a laugh from Reuben. “That backpack is so big, it looks like you’re a porter from an anime.”

“Not wrong,” Nacho agreed with only a hint of strain in his voice. “But it’s magical. A little gift for Satiation Players, since we are so rare. I’m surprised, actually. It seems they like making it hard on people to do anything. Like, you know, existing. The Patrons generally don’t make anything easy, but this backpack was only four hundred credits. I suppose it’s not all that surprising, now that I think about it. You need at least fifteen points in Fitness to carry this thing, and twenty to carry it around easily like I’m pretending to do.”

“What in the world are you doing not having that in a Storage Slot?” Brie tapped at the pack, wincing when there was no give at all. “How heavy is that?”

“The real question is: why are we walking so far ahead of everyone?” Reuben snapped his fingers. “Oh, that’s right! Because you two are anti-social.”

“No, we’re not!” Brie defensively turned her attention to her husband. “Just for that, I’m not talking to anyone for the rest of the day.”

“Proving. My. Point!” Reuben shoved a finger into the sky to mark his win.

“Keep the sweet talk in your apartment, lovebirds.” Nacho finished his adjustments to his mobile kitchen. “We’re not anti-social. We just don’t want to walk with the Bills and other people. We’re fine, just the three of us. We could wait for Taye, though. We all like Taye.”

“We do like Taye,” Reuben agreed easily. “Also… you should call Young Bill ‘Scrubz’. He asked for it. It’s polite.”

“Taye is fine, but I worry about the Bills going full mutiny when we get close to the Dragon Spear.” Brie scowled as she tied her hair back in a ponytail, ignoring her husband’s drawn out sigh. “Bill only wants us to find it as a reminder that we ‘forced’ him into the guild. It’s his way of maintaining his reasoning for disliking us. I’m not sure I want to play into that.”

Reuben scratched his chin, and when he opened his mouth, Nacho knew immediately that the man’s next words would not be anything that actually contributed to the conversation. “I don’t think it’s a mutiny when it’s on land. Would the right word be rebellion? Or revolution?”

Nacho shrugged his shoulders in the sunshine, making his pack wobble precariously once more. “I think with a revolution, you need a drummer. Bare minimum.”

“Understandable,” Reuben agreed, the bizarre non sequitur making Brie mime hitting him with her hammer. The ground was a little soft from the rain, but it was dry, the sun was out, and the air was finally getting warmer. Spring’s arrival meant that there was always a chance that the temperature might fall thirty degrees overnight, but that was a risk they needed to live with at this point.

“Speaking of people we like, that Colleen gal doesn't seem unhappy to sit near you at dinner.” Reuben waggled his eyebrows obnoxiously.

“Don’t see it,” Nacho deflected instantly. “Not one little bit. You’re looking for something that’s not there.”

Reuben hurried to follow after his wife, but he threw a sinister smile over his shoulder. “We’ll see, Nacho. She hasn’t decided if she’s going to guard the caravan or go on the Dragon Spear quest with us. I hope she picks the UnderFun. Who knows? There might be love in the air.”

“Screams,” Nacho deadpanned, his eyes going hollow. “There will be screams in the air. It’s like love, but with far less romance and much more… screaming.”

“That can be fun in the right circumstances-”

“Anyway,” Brie cut her husband off impatiently, “at what point should we decide to invest in upgrading me and Reuben? Neither one of us wants to lose our magic items, and it’s scarily expensive.”

“Necessary,” Nacho pointed out with a shake of his head. “We can’t have you stuck at level nine skills forever. We need you to be a lot more powerful—and there’s also at least a chance you won’t lose your magic items. It’s a bad chance, but a chance nonetheless.”

Brie saw right through him. “They’re gone when we rank up. I get that. Let’s just make sure to plan properly to have good weapons on hand when we get to that point. C’mon. Let’s get some miles under our belt. If we beat the others to the Heartbreak Ridge cabin, we can discuss our plans for leveling there with relative privacy.”

All three of them agreed with that sentiment. Since he was with the best fighter and Healer in his guild, Nacho didn’t worry about making too much noise with his big creaking backpack. The way he saw it, if they could draw in monsters, they could kill them and get credits.

That didn’t happen.

They did spot an unkindness of Oscreeches flying overhead. The heavily muscled legs trailing behind them made Brie consider using the bow so they could have enormous drumsticks for dinner, but the giant emu-eagle crossovers were flying too high to make it worth taking the shot.

They covered a lot of ground, traveling through the morning. The day was bright, the trees bursting with new growth, and the grasses were greening up nicely. Everything smelled fresh and good. There were even some tulips coming up through the dirt, which reminded Nacho of an incoming unfortunate fact: the flowers would be changed by Putrid Mana, like everything else.

No one had really needed to fight many monster plants to this point, though that would change with the coming of Spring. The Juxtaposition had started the previous autumn, with things dying, and then winter had happened—not a lot of growth there—so Spring meant the onset of monstrous plant life.

Meandering toward the bottom of Heartbreak Ridge, they found that the latest Caravan had nearly caught up to them and was currently passing under a canopy of Oilbark trees whose roots spread across the uneven ground. Unlike the mostly dry tree that stood sentinel over the Deep Buggy Darkness, these Oilbarks were leaking ichor across the spongy soil, and the resulting goo had trapped the treads of their three wagons. Nacho looked again, “Wait… those treads shouldn’t be stopped by a little oil?”

There was something else going on; that much was clear. The wagons had formed a triangle, or rather a makeshift fort. The humans that walked on the treadmills had been directed into the center to maintain their safety. Abby and Kristie, along with the other caravan guards, suddenly found themselves under attack by a large herd of smelly cheese-horned goats. Their pliant white flesh was a bit melted from the sun, dripping down onto their sharp hooves.

These Goat Cheeses were easily three times the size of the ones that Nacho had processed before. Upon reading the System View on them, he sucked in a harsh breath.

Extra-Sharp Goat Cheese

Effective Tier/Level: ??

HP: ?

These things were Tier one, but they couldn’t be very high-level. There were a dozen in the herd, and they stormed forward as one. Kristie hurled her Sorcery Strike magic, while another Archer fired arrows, but it was Abby who did the heavy work.

She charged out front without hesitation, smashing her staff into goat after goat and doing some real damage to their feta cheese frames. A blunt crack of her staff on a cheddar horn sent it rolling across the ground. It wasn’t made of cheddar cheese, more like a typical horn covered in cheddar cheese powder, so it was even more impressive a feat.

“Brie, we need to get over there and help them.” Nacho dropped his pack, equipped his armor from his Storage Slot in an instant, then stored the pack in the now-empty slot. He turned and blasted toward the enemy, his twenty-points-in-every-characteristic shining through as he sped to join the battle.

Meanwhile, Kristie and the other guards had climbed onto the yellow and red tarps covering the wagons. Their aim had been to escape the goats, but enemies had appeared in the air as well. The low-level Archer next to Kristie fired an arrow at some kind of monster bird, only for gray-green tentacles to encircle the bow and try to pull it away. Kristie flung her pink missiles into the creature, and it went flying away with a furious squawking.

The monster bird was quickly joined by its other bird friends, and the flock swooped low for another run. Nacho thought he recognized them, a quick System View confirming his suspicion.

Robin Deadbreast

Effective Tier/Level:??

HP:?

These were high-level creatures, and their swooping assault explained why the wagons had been forced to stop there, in the muddy recesses of the Oilbark trees. The Robin Deadbreasts were exactly like normal robins, if normal robins were the size of rottweilers. Where their red breasts should’ve been dangled a nasty snarl of rotting tentacles. In that way, they were similar to Ghoul Deer, except the Robin Deadbreasts also had razor-sharp beaks and claws which could rend flesh in any number of gruesome ways.

Nacho ordinarily wouldn’t have worried too much—these were creatures a coordinated attack could fend off near-indefinitely—except for the arrows bristling out of the tarps of the wagons. This little ambush wasn’t planned by monster feta goats and undead squid birds. This was a premeditated direct attack on his guild.

Just as he was about to curse Crave out of sheer force of habit, he heard weaselly laughter and noticed Myron in the shadows of a nearby Oilbark Tree. He twirled a set of daggers menacingly, though Nacho was pretty sure those knives didn’t have even half the magic his HungerCry Knives offered.

He was happy that he had managed to nerf the Assassin, but a serious question remained. Was this an attack by Kala and the Sunrise Brigade? Or was it just Myron acting alone? This fight might turn out to be a lot more consequential than Myron expected. If the weasel wasn’t acting alone, and his people were being targeted by two outside guilds…

Nacho would finally have enough reason to decisively hunt both of them down and end the threats they represented without the risk of giving anyone in his guild anything to complain about.