CWD: Sewer Skewers ~ Four

Nacho didn’t know if Brie had done any damage to the rat or not. It was obviously a peak Tier one monster, leaving them little opportunity to actually cause it any harm. If it was close to level nineteen, they were going to find out exactly how fast they were able to run away.

The cook hoped, for all their sakes, that the newly-upgraded Berserker working in tandem with the others would result in breaking through the greasy rat’s defenses without getting caught by Sam’s club. It didn't take long for him to realize it was a futile hope, as the others needed to focus on the fight with the spiders descending in a sea of furry legs.

Atop their squat bodies were monstrous human heads, complete with fiendish fangs. All the human portions seemed strangely familiar, and Nacho wouldn’t be surprised if they had been grown from the employees that had been working the day of the apocalypse. He had seen more disturbing things.

Nacho summoned his HungerCry Knives, hesitant to fight but knowing that these beasts weren’t a real opponent to him. If he killed any of the creepy-crawlies, he wouldn’t get credits… but he didn’t need to care about that anymore. His grip tightened, and he moved forward with intent to kill. Surviving was the most important thing, and if falling back wasn’t possible, he’d feel terrible if something happened to one of his people due to his hesitating about earning the maximum number of credits.

Overnight Stalking Spiders

Effective Tier/Level: ?

HP: ?

Nacho was glad they were Tier zero, but the names seemed to follow his original idea that they were made from recycled employees. His suspicion was further confirmed when he heard the things whispering, “Hungry. Sleepy. Customers.”

“Twenty-eight Health Points each, which means I don't have enough arrows!” Taye shouted after he had opened fire with his arrows. Using Fast Quiver allowed him to send three arrows and hit three separate spiders in his first volley. “I’ve never heard of a creature that hates customers-”

“Clearly you’ve never had to work in customer service. Sometimes I forget how young you are.” Reuben’s sniping was with words, but they were aimed as well as Taye’s arrows and eased the tension on the group even though everyone knew the situation wasn’t in their favor. The Healer stormed forward, his fists crunching exoskeletons; each successful hit inflicted fourteen points of damage. A right, then a left, a splash of green blood, and the first arachnid monster curled into a pile of twitching limbs and limp hair.

Other spiders took the opportunity to retaliate, and soon the limburger stink of the Ring of Cheese filled the air. Nacho leapt into action as his friend cried out, a knife flashing dangerously in each hand.

The Hunger cleaver dropped like a guillotine as the Cry chef’s knife sliced a beautifully deadly pattern through the spiders. He punched the knife into a pliant body under the chin of a half-shaved head and chopped into an oversized tattoo. This wasn’t the first time he’d fought a spider monster, but it was the first time he’d had a potent weapon that he could use in battle. If it could even be called a battle: his Small Blades Skill was turning out to be the perfect compliment to the HungerCry Knives. In the amount of time it usually took to land a single blow, he didn’t get in one attack… he got four.

In the kitchen, the blades halved his chopping time. On the battlefield, the Skill translated into dicing up Stalker Spiders. Stab and chop, chop and stab; the results were very satisfying, even if it was turning his stomach to kill creatures with a human face that showed pain.

Congratulations! You have killed an Overnight Stalking Spider!

Tier 0 Standard Creature = 0 Credits

Stupendous job!

“I changed my mind. That is deeply satisfying, and I could keep it up all day!” A spider leapt onto him from behind, while another was stopped in its tracks as he turned and bisected it with a blade that practically left afterimages with the attack.

Even with as fast as they were able to take down individual spiders, both he and Reuben started to take buckets of damage from the arachnids’ venom. The Healer took a bad bite to the leg and shouted, “I think I know why there’s so many of them! They unionized! They don’t care how many they lose, so long as they are the only survivor at the end!”

“No wonder we’re getting nibbled to death!” Nacho called back in a horrified voice.

Health remaining: 53/68!

Health remaining: 46/68!

Nacho’s Health Points continued to tick down until he was under forty. All benefits from his Cooking Magic had been used up and were being put to the test. A half-dozen strikes later, a handful of spiders were dead, but the fact that he needed to be healed didn’t go unnoticed.

Reuben tackled him into a bear hug right there on the floor, and they went sliding through the green ichor and spider chunks together. Taye and Kristie teamed up to rescue them, the archer using one arrow to take sixteen health from a spider before Kristie blasted it with a pink missile of colorful destruction. Thanks to Reuben’s Positive Vibes and the chicken and waffles, her Sorcery Strike blasts were able to reduce the damaged creatures to pink-hued paste in no time.

By arrow and by strike, Taye and Kristie were ending the threat of the spiders almost as quickly as they had arrived. For each one they killed, the Nacho heard a light *cha-ching* as the Chips Guild received ten percent of the credits in taxes. That made him happy, something solely needed right then, as he was trapped underneath a sweaty guy who smelled like cheese fermenting inside a gym sock.

As Nacho was back to full Health, he reminded himself that the discomfort was worth it. He turned his head just in time to see Abby spin her staff and slam it into Ratty Sam. A flash of silver light flooded the space as her skills added some tasty damage, or so he thought. Brie dropped back, breathing hard. She looked pale and hungry. “She needs some of my soup… Abby too.”

Ratty Sam attempted to slam his club into Abby's side, but she was able to slip her ironbound staff between herself and the monster’s weapon in the nick of time.  The Warrior’s Slippery Block talent wasn’t as expensive as Brie’s skill, but it also didn’t completely block the attack: she got sent flying.

“I reached back for an arrow, but my quiver's empty!” Taye called helplessly.

“Time for Death Blossom!” Nacho bellowed his order, making his entire team flinch.

“Are you sure?” Kristie’s voice was almost lost in the skittering of spider legs as they closed in from all sides. “You know that hits everyone in range, right?”

“I can take it!” Reuben roared as he puffed himself up as large as possible. “Everyone behind me, it’s time to get smelly. Blood and cheese!”

The humans lined up behind Reuben, as close to him as they could manage. Nacho’s stomach turned at the thought of his friend burning from the magic, so he tried to close his nostrils against the incoming stink of cheese and flesh. A moment later, Kristie was standing in front of the team as they huddled together in the hopes of minimizing the damage they would take.

She had a water bottle in her hand in preparation of using the majority of her Thirst points, and Nacho nodded in appreciation of her forethought. She needed to keep her resources in check, and it showed that she was getting used to her role.

“Death Blossom!” The swarm of spiders leapt onto Kristie, and she erupted in a fuschia explosion as countless tiny hot pink magic missiles fired off from her skin in every direction. The spells crackled through the spiders, singing off hairs, turning tattoos into brands, and cauterizing the heads and legs of the weakest spiders.

The micro-missiles pelted Reuben’s back like hail, and his limburger scent increased to sidewalk feta cheese growing in a sewer. Nacho couldn’t stop himself from gagging. The fluorescent pink barrage also hit Ratty Sam, who was utterly unharmed by the damage—at Tier one, any damage required a minimum threshold, and twelve points per bolt wasn’t going to cut it.

Most of the already wounded spiders curled up into shriveled husks as the searing projectiles tore through them, leaving only three remaining.

Kristie fell to her knees. Her Death Blossom had hit every target in a fifteen-foot radius unless it was blocked, but it was also very expensive. The Warlock had continued hurling wave after wave of energy blasts, at three points of Mana and ten percent of her Thirst each, for a massive total cost of fifty Thirst Points and fifteen Mana. She’d dealt with the Thirst by chugging the water bottle, but she remained dangerously low on Mana, and all Regens were disabled until the battle was over.

Taye scrambled forward, pulling arrows out of corpses and firing them into the last few spiders, likely too hungry to use his Skills. His arrows were dealing heavy damage, but without the sniper-damage or Skills like Fast Quiver, taking the monster spiders out quickly was going to be nearly impossible.

Meanwhile, Reuben rose to his feet, having collapsed onto the cook. Nacho sucked in some non-cheesy air and stowed the HungerCry Knives in his storage before standing up and summoning jars of monster noodle soup. He shoved the containers into Reuben’s hands, telling him, “Go heal Brie and Abby, then make them eat the soup. I’ll help Taye and Kristie.”

“Soup’s on, Body Players!” Reuben sped over to where the pair of women were trading blows with Ratty Sam. Brie was distracted by her husband and took a club right in the chest, but she spun with it as blood flew from her mouth, landing a wicked blow on the rat’s toes. “Ooh, those piggies aren’t going to market. I’m coming, Brie!”

Taye let out a yelp and stumbled as two of the last spiders scurried onto his legs and tore mouthfuls out of him. Hunger and Cry whistled in Nacho’s hands as he became a blur of stabbing. He took out both spiders in no time flat, and as a reward for surviving, Nacho tossed Taye a pocket pancake. From there, the cook raced over and slapped a fresh water bottle into Kristie’s hands.

Satisfied they wouldn’t die in the next few moments, he turned just in time to watch Brie deliver her final blow to Ratty Sam.

In a beautiful display of both Defensive Whirl and Combat Dash, she brushed aside Sam’s club, then backhanded her hammer into the rodent’s enormous face… where it bounced off and nearly rebounded out of her hands and onto her face.

The giant rat reeled back and glared at her, then looked around and noticed that it was the final monster on the field. It hissed a feral warning that promised future suffering, then jumped straight up, grabbed a shelf, and vanished into the stacks.

Congratulations, player! Active Combat is over! What an outcome! Ratty Sam had a complicated relationship with the Spiders. The rat would knock over a shelf, and the Overnight Stalkers would clean it up while complaining the entire time. Sadly, none of the management answered any concerns, due to being dead, which led to an oversized swarm as the spiders had no obstacles to becoming unionized workers.

Now there’s no one to keep this place clean, and that’s on you. May your future be delicious!

Brie was breathing hard and chewing angrily, a stray noodle dribbling down her chin. “All that, and I couldn’t even hurt that thing. Also, Nacho, the soup was jelly. It was jelly soup. Drinking that nearly made me suffocate.”

Nacho winced as he realized where the cooled recipe had gone wrong. “That would be the congealed fat. I told Reuben to shake up the jar.”

His supposed friend crossed his arms in an ‘X’ over his chest. “False.”

“No?” The cook paused and immediately understood what had happened. “I meant to tell Reuben to shake the jar. How were the noodles?”

“I was already chewing the soup, Nacho. The noodles just meant more chewing.” Brie squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to temper her… temper, and give usable feedback. “The meat got stuck in my throat and made me nearly hurl-”

“That’s-”

She pointed at her husband threateningly, cutting off anything he might have been about to say. “No jokes, Reuben. I don’t know for sure where you were going with that, and for your sake, you should keep it that way.”

Taye didn’t join in the after-fighting verbal beatdown, as he was too busy gathering arrows. Kristie was looking better, but she’d drained all the water they’d brought; the main drawback of keeping a Mind Player going through combat. Body Players needed food. Mind Players needed water. Nacho, as a Satiation Player, needed both. He’d fought against the Spiders, but his real job started when the fighting stopped.

In fact, it was time for Ingredient Processing. He’d have to hurry—the spiders wouldn’t last very long. “Throw me a bottle of the green stuff, Reuben.”

Nacho caught the Pellegrino, twisted off the cap, and let the bubbly Italian spring water flow. It was delicious and would help him keep his Thirst levels up. Combine that with a few pocket pancakes, and he was ready to get to his main job.

From his backpack, he retrieved huge containers of salt and pepper for his go-to recipe, also known as the simplest recipe available: meat, salt, pepper.

The System let him know he was in the thick of it:

Hey, player! During ingredient processing, you cannot access the Store, and both your Health and your Mana Regens have been paused. You have two ingredients in hand and have acquired a third, which is full of Putrid Mana. Yuck! Since you’re not cooking, you wanna process your newly acquired spider meat?

Yes / No

Nacho chose ‘yes’, and a new message appeared all in red.

Here’s a warning for you, cookie. This monster contains human meat. Are you sure you wanna go down this route?
Yes / No

He slapped ‘no’ like it had wronged him and let out a huge sigh. He’d dealt with a fair share of insects, thanks to the Chips Guild being built above an insect dungeon: the Deep Buggy Darkness. He could work around exoskeletons, legs, and all sorts of other issues, but… cutting off the human head would be a bit much even for him. The fact that the System seemed to indicate an issue using anything even remotely human was actually a good excuse not to cut them up, but the vague warning had him truly concerned. “Most likely, if I used human meat, I’d get a hidden debuff of some kind, and the recipes I got in the future would be… limited. No need to risk it.”

While he watched the spiders slowly break down into bubbling pools of nasty, the others went scavenging and found plenty of usable food. Everything in the freezer and refrigerator sections was lost to rot, but they unearthed stacks of brand-name coffee, cinnamon, a variety of canned foods, breakfast cereals, and glorious vacuum-sealed snacks.

It wasn’t long before the last of the spiders had fully liquified like bananas on a hot counter.

Congratulations! You made a wise choice, and you deserve some credit for it, even if it was the boring route! Here’s an additional 144 credits for sticking to your class and being a class act—that can take some real guts. Good luck being delicious!

The god-like Patrons sometimes threw gifts around, and Nacho learned not to question it. He’d pocket those credits and be grateful for them. Not a second later, Reuben called from one aisle. “We’ve struck Wheat Thins! I repeat, we have struck Wheat Thins! Ahh!”

From there, the only sound coming from Reuben’s aisle was the crinkling of plastic and the crunching of tiny, delicious squares. Ignoring the rapturous munching in the depths of the shelves, Brie trudged over to the cook, seeming troubled about something behind her, if the fact that she kept checking over her shoulder was any indication. “Ahh, Nacho? You might want to come and look at this. I found… well… I don’t know what I found.”

Nacho wiped the blood off his hands with actual wet wipes, then noticed that the Costco didn’t end at a wall like he’d expected. Beyond the floorspace where they’d fought Ratty Sam stood an entire series of shelves holding standard goods… if Costco had been around during medieval France.