Chapter 27 of 35 · Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

Chapter 27 — Physical

Book: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook · Previous: Chapter 26 — Growler Gary · Next: Chapter 28 — Plan C · Floor: Floor 4 — The Iron Tangle · Series: the series

Opening

“He ended up being really brave,” Donut said as we lashed the last hand to the pedestal.

Summary

Gary's hands are lashed to the pedestals with rope ('we really need duct tape'). Bautista has lost fifty getting to the right level of the pit — flyers sucked into a black-hole pull at its centre, a gangway collapsed. A test rope fed into the abyss portal goes taut and vanishes; Carl reads Milk's sixth-edition note on portals in the bathroom and has begun writing his own chapter in the hidden scratchpad. Each cart's blade is tuned to a different yard, painted on its side; the one for yard E stays. To make the silent carts audible he mounts an alarm trap on each: the first plays 'Physical' — Bautista had a gold coin on 'Eye of the Tiger' — and vanishes through the Sinopia portal. Then thirty stage-three monsters come down the Vermillion track; the party hides in the Downward Dog and lets them pass. Carl loads the backward-facing engine with hobgoblin dynamite on a pole-trigger and sends it down the line after them ('if any of you guys want to send me duct tape'), pocketing Eva's dropped saber as he jumps. Elle reports from 36: Eva is not there; Li Jun's best friend loves his demon sister; the mushroom man. A far-off explosion — the four crawlers in Carl's 'Yard F' chat group are dead, part of a team of three or four hundred; Carl thinks they blew the soul crystal at a station 72. Then Carl's train bomb: level 35, Explosives Handling 11, and everyone at 36 knocked off their feet. 'Let's not do that again.'

With the line sealed the blister ghouls turn toward 75; a cart tuned to the abyss corks the tunnel and they walk into it like lemmings. Hours of grinding: Katia as a three-legged sentinel gun with the crossbow behind a flesh shield, Donut fighting mounted. Eva's blade is the Left Fang of the Green Sultan, half a set. A single stage-three monster — once a Razor Fox, now a hippo-sized jelly with a tentacled back and a round toothed mouth, its old skull visible inside — shrugs off bolts, chokes on a Banger Sphere and a half-strength hob-lobber, and bursts. No experience: it hatched. Krakaren Crotch Dumplings, level 1, thousands of them, and the AI's story time: a lonely creature who could brew anything in her stomach and wanted a child; the ghouls were the failures; these are clones; the collective mind comes later. Donita Grace's last message from station 24: 'Millions of them.' Moonshine and a torch on the track. 'I hope they stay at station 24.'

Characters

• Carl — Launches six singing carts; builds a train bomb; hits level 35; learns what stage three lays.
• Katia Grim — The sentinel-gun form; the Left Fang.
• Princess Donut — 'Wonderwall'; mounted practice; finds the hatchlings.
• Daniel Bautista — Fifty dead on the catwalks; 'Eye of the Tiger'; hidden pets.
• Elle McGibbons — Searches 36 for Eva; the mushroom man; 'Typical day.'
• Growler Gary — Donut: 'He ended up being really brave'
• Donita Grace — Dead at station 24: the last message.

Locations

• Station 75 — Carts dispatched; the Vermillion tunnel corked with a portal.
• The stairwell rooms — Station 24 is where the Krakaren young go; a 72 blown by its own crystal.

Motifs

• The Krakaren — The floor's design revealed: every mob a womb for Krakaren clones.
• Explosives — A train bomb on a pole trigger; the soul-crystal warning ignored elsewhere.
• The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook — Milk on portals; Carl begins writing the 25th edition.
• The Rev-Up Vitamin Shots — 'The DTs are always fatal.'