Time to Level Collapse: 6 days 29 hours 59 minutes

  Cascadia picked me up off my sleeping cot and dropped me into a chair for breakfast and the recap. Cascadia had the ability to wake up whenever she wanted to and Parson used his sleep-aid item to wake up early, but my body always wanted to sleep more. I wasn’t tired per se, I think Shelly was right about sleep needs, but I was used to sleeping a lot. Parson said that once we had access to stores he would be able to craft as much sleep-aid as we wanted.

  Cascadia sat with us and watched the whole recap this time. The start was the same as it always was, with crawler after crawler meeting gruesome deaths. A few larger groups had decided to try their hand against city bosses. None had succeeded. The second segment began with the normal cast; the mech warrior continued to white knight his way around the dungeon, and the dance crew took out a borough boss with their resonance attacks. There were some newcomers; a trio of crawlers who were all using grenade launchers were shown completely disintegrating a boss lair, and a bigger group that all used melee weapons were shown trapping a boss with a large net before surrounding it and stabbing it to death.

  Cascadia’s boss fight took the final spot on the show. It showed her challenging the boss, the cage forming, and then skipped to her pummeling his head before collaring him. The scene finished with us loading up barrel after barrel of mead into the APC. Cascadia let out a satisfied sigh as the daily update came on.

  Hello Crawlers,

  Your performance continues to be acceptable and our expertly designed tutorial floor requires no adjustments. As floor collapse draws nearer, take note of a few differences. As most of you know by now, the third floor will begin with class and race selection. This process can be quite time consuming; to accommodate all crawler needs the third floor will fully open eight hours before second level collapse. If you descend before then you will be trapped in the saferoom area, but as soon as the eight hour mark is reached, race selection will be available. If you complete the selection process early, you will have a small head start on the floor.

  That is all.

  Cascadia was playing it cool, but a quick check showed that my follower count was rising rapidly; I was sure hers was experiencing a much more dramatic increase.

  “Well,” she said, standing up. “It’s training time.”

  “How about I use my codex for thirty minutes and then we do training.”

  Cascadia grunted but didn’t reject my proposed alteration to our schedule. She spent the time testing her physical limits while Parson just relaxed. When I was done, we moved on to our standard training.

  While Parson and I had not gotten any rewards from the last alpha orc, Cascadia had gotten two boxes; one upgraded boss box for ending the boss fight in a non-standard but still satisfying way, and one silver gladiator box for winning a single combat challenge. The gladiator box had contained an exo-joint system that increased strength and replaced her arm and knee pads. Cascadia put them on for our training session but ultimately decided that she didn’t like the feel. She put them in her inventory to sell or give away later.

  The silver boss box had contained an item she did end up keeping. It was called a Banshee-Line Cyberlarynx. She had had to swallow the small metal box, which then self-installed itself in her throat. In addition to causing some cool, glowing lines to appear on her neck whenever she used it, it allowed her to amplify her voice, apply basic voice effects, and use a level fifteen Static Scream ability on a fifteen hour cooldown. This was a new ability to me and I was excited to see it in action. Apparently, it would disrupt electronics in a cone, stunning or staggering robotic and cybernetic opponents, disabling electronic weapons, and interrupting channeled abilities. Cascadia opted not to try it out during training due to its long cooldown.

  After training, we started hunting. My alcohol collection plans had completed far ahead of schedule and I was feeling great. We had the foundations to build an enormous amount of wealth, we were already ahead of the level curve, and we still had six full days left to grind and find reward rooms. Things were looking very good.

  With the three of us fighting together, most of the wandering mobs were just trivial. Despite our discussion about specialization, Cascadia was heavily favoring her staff for these fights. In her focused state her skill was incredible. She was increasingly utilizing the weapon’s unique abilities, altering the length and weight of the staff mid strike to increase damage and catch enemies off guard.

  When we ran into a group of alien monster clowns on motorized unicycles, Cascadia jammed her staff into the wheel of one, then threw him into another mob before thrusting forward, lengthening her weapon to crush them both against the tunnel wall. She finished the fight by leaping into the midst of the remaining three clowns and activating her Seismic Strike skill, knocking them to the ground, before slamming her staff rapidly from side to side until her enemies were more paste than solid flesh.

  I decided to try something.

  “I bet you can’t fight like that with your gun. I used to think you were an elitist, but now I think you just can’t handle it.”

  Cascadia turned and fixed me with an inscrutable stare.

  “That came out pretty lame didn’t it,” I whispered to Parson.

  “It’s hard to imagine a more pathetic attempt.”

  “Do you think it will still work?”

  “Probably.”

  Cascadia rode in the back of the APC, gun in her lap and her miniaturized staff in her mouth like a piece of straw or a tobacco stick. We were heading to a cyborg drone mining center that served as one of the neighborhood's main monster dens. There, Cascadia was going to show me “just what she was capable of with her rifle, or any other weapon I doubted her on.”

  “Two minutes to contact,” I said, confirming our distance with my scouting drone.

  “Set your timers,” Cascadia said. “We are going to clear this entire den in record time. What are we looking at?”

  “Large, open area on bottom. Lots of material transport going on there, they have three main piles they are dropping rock into. They have two additional tiers of platforms built up the wall, I guess they are mining upwards for some reason. There are long walkways going along the wall that connect into a large staging area at each level. There’s some sort of control station room at the top too, bolted into the ceiling. That's probably the boss chamber. Three types of mob. Bipedal cyborg drone workers, they look like stereotypical get close and rush zombie types; heavy duty quadruped drones, lots of armor and big plasma cutters, still humanoid torso though; and loaders, I think they are just robots. They can’t move but I’d bet a thousand credits they are going to throw rocks and take a ton of hits. More loaders and quadrupeds on the upper two levels, lots of bipedals on the ground floor, carting stuff around.”

  “Ok. Park us in the middle of the bottom level; I’ll soften up the mobs there while you two get situated, then I’ll go clear the top two levels while you finish off the bottom. I’ll wait for you up top for the boss battle.”

  “How much “situating” do you think we need?”

  “More than me, that's for sure. I don’t want you to get caught in melee like what happened at the lizard den. Set yourself up so you can’t be flanked and hold your position with your drone and turrets and Parson’s thing. I have your antenna, so don’t forget your oh shit! button if you get in trouble.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “I don’t have an oh shit button,” Parson said.

  “You can just drop an incense stick and stand in the knockout cloud.”

  “I don’t have any more incense sticks.”

  Cascadia let out an annoyed sound but Parson continued.

  “But I’ve got some other tricks, I’m not worried.”

  “Of course you do. Looks like we’re here. And Gel? Keep that scout drone camera on me. I don’t want to have this come up again.”

  With that, she kicked open the back door and jumped out of the vehicle as I slammed the brakes and we skidded to a stop.

  She rolled and came up to a half kneeling position, rifle at her shoulder, and started shooting. There were dozens of the bipedal drones; they had haphazardly put together, mechanical lower bodies and ultra pale-skinned torsos. They all dropped their loads of rock and began lurching towards Cascadia. Her rapid fire blasts dropped a full dozen of them while Parson and I set up with our backs to the side of the APC.

  The drones started to get in range for their charge ability and a few lurched forward with a burst of speed. Cascadia stood her ground, dropping one quickly by switching to the continuous beam mode and melting its head clean off. As the next one reached her she ducked and spun, sweeping the drone from his feet. As she did so she popped out the spent battery cell and slapped a new one into place, killing the downed drone with a burst to the head before turning to slam another charging drone to the ground with her rifle butt and finishing him in similar fashion.

  As more mobs began to charge she flicked her staff out of her mouth and extended it, riding the top of the staff up to the lower level platform. Parson and I started firing into the mass of cyborgs and they began shambling towards us as the quadrupeds that had been heading to the downramps turned to face Cascadia.

  While none of our weapons were as powerful as Cascadia’s rifle individually, between us, Parson and I had plenty of combined fire power to keep the mobs at bay, even as more filed out of mining holes and living quarters to join the fight. I paced Cascadia with my all-purpose drone as she ran to engage four quadruped cyborgs. They had thick, two-segment legs, heavy armor plating on their torsos and heads, and carried large plasma saws. Instead of keeping her distance and shooting them as they approached, Cascadia dove right into the middle of the group. She ducked, leapt, and twirled as she danced between their plasma saws, firing her rifle all the while. With a dodge skill of eight she avoided their attacks with fluid grace, and though she hadn’t used her rifle much on this floor, she had leveled up her skills considerably on the previous floor. Still, it almost seemed like I could see her skill increasing over the course of the fight. She was switching between firing modes, targeting weak spots with rapid fire and melting through armor with the continuous beam mode, all the while swapping spent battery packs with blinding speed.

  After finishing two opponents by melting holes in their chest armor, she dodged a swipe of a saw and leapt onto her attacker, balancing on its shoulders. She blasted through the relatively thin armor, destroying the creature's brain. I noticed that she had gotten in range of one of the robot loaders and futilely tried to shout as it launched a small boulder at her. She couldn’t hear me, but she still twisted out of the way at the last second and the boulder smashed into the last quadruped mob. She hopped down and approached the loader, dodging a steady barrage of boulders.

  Parson and I had cleared out all of the ground level mobs, so I sent my attack drones to start on on the top level mobs; my arc cannon was extremely effective against low level cyborgs. Cascadia used her continuous beam mode as she neared the loader, attacking the arm joint and disabling the limb. She repeated the move on the other limb as she got closer, removing any chance the loader had to attack her. She used the last of her battery charge to weaken the chest plate and then shoved her left hand forward, extending her rings into finger blades, ramming them through the mob’s chest, and ripping out a bundle of internal wires and servos.

  Battery packs all spent, she turned to face a line of cyborgs that were coming down a ramp from the upper tier to engage her. I couldn’t hear the scream through my drone, which still lacked auditory sensors, but the sound was painfully loud from where I was on the ground floor. The entire line of mobs collapsed, totally inert, circuits sparking and lights dimming. She finished off the disabled cyborgs as Parson and I started our climb. We met her at the top a minute later, slightly out of breath. She looked at me expectantly.

  “That was….reasonably impressive I suppose.”

  She snorted. “Whatever. Also, the power needs really lower this weapon’s viability; I went through every battery I had in my utility belt and then some. I had to start swapping spent ones with fresh ones from my inventory, which is extremely inconvenient in the middle of combat.”

  “Meh, you didn’t look that inconvenienced. And there are probably better batteries we can get later.”

  “Yeah, probably. You two ready for this boss fight?”

  I looked at the suspected boss chamber warily. It was a medium sized office building suspended from the ceiling with chains. There was only a thin walkway leading up to it. I didn’t consider myself scared of heights, but I wasn’t too comfortable with our current situation.

  “I…don’t like being up this high. And I don’t want to try to balance on that walkway to get to the boss chamber. Maybe we just skip this one, our experience gains are going to start plateauing for the floor soon anyways.”

  “Not a chance. Just keep your oh shit! button in hand and use it to teleport to me if you fall.”

  Cascadia took the lead and I followed very close behind her, the oh shit! button clutched tightly in my hand. The hanging building was small for a boss lair, not more than ten meters long and five wide, but it still had a small antechamber, a sure sign something nasty lay behind the inner door. The inner door wouldn’t open until we had all crowded into the antechamber and the outer door slammed shut, locking us in. We were pressed together tightly, my drones barely fit in the room with us. Cascadia pushed open the door, revealing a dimly lit room, seemingly empty except for chains hanging from ceiling to floor at regular intervals.

  No boss battle intro played and my anxiety rose as I turned up the light on my utility module to inspect the corners. Just as I started to send the drone forward, the floor fell out from under us. We were twenty meters off the ground, and even with my constitution enhancements, I didn’t think I would survive the drop. I snatched at a chain, grabbing with my free hand and trying to wrap my other arm around the chain without dropping my button, but my base strength was two and I had no enhancements. I slipped downwards and even though I saw Cascadia reaching for me with her nano-fingers, I panicked and pushed the button. I disappeared and reappeared right in front of Cascadia and she swore, grabbing me by the arm as she held fast to her chain. Whatever she tried to say next was interrupted as an eerie, frantic, trill sounded and a boss theme started up.

  B-B-B-Boss Battle!

  Blue glowing circles captured our images and floated them in the air as a figure emerged from the corner and the world froze.

  Versus!

  Spiderbot Overseer!

  Level 14 neighborhood boss!

  Getting sent to the overseer’s office is every cyborg drone’s worst nightmare. Given the shape of a spider specifically to trigger the innate fear instinct buried within their biological remnants, the overseer terrorizes her charges, ensuring no dissent in the ranks. She doesn’t consume blood like a true spider, but she is still more than happy to spill yours!

  The world unfroze and the human sized spider bot began to crawl slowly towards us, weaving through the chains. I dropped the oh shit! button as I scrabbled to get a better grip on Cascadia. Parson was holding onto a chain with his hand and the tongue of his gun, but he let go for a moment to fire a few spikes at the approaching monster. The boss was nimble and it was difficult to aim on the swinging chains; only one shot hit but a health bar appeared, dropping by about ten percent.

  “Stop freaking out and use your damn drones! I’m not going to drop you,” Cascadia said as I flailed my legs, searching futilely for something to support myself. Despite her statement, she did drop me and I screamed as I fell for a brief moment before she caught me with her legs. She reached down and grabbed her incendiary revolver from her boot sheath, and her and Parson did their best to drive the boss back. They scored a few hits but Cascadia’s pistol only held seven rounds and she couldn’t reload one handed.

  I closed my eyes, trying to focus through the vertigo. I had spent enough time living through my drones that I was able to escape my natural senses and move my conscious attention into my machines. I swarmed the boss as it reached Cascadia, who was swatting at it with a shortened staff. Though the lair setup lowered Cascadia and Parsons effectiveness significantly, the boss itself was relatively weak, and my drones were able to destroy it before it could do any real damage.

  Winner!

  During the brief freeze I returned my attention to my own body, which was still dangling in the air. I tried to stay calm as Cascadia took my arm with her extended fingers and swung me over to the walkway. Cascadia helped Parson swing his way back over and then let go of her chain, dropping straight down. She lengthened her staff, which she had kept in her mouth the entire fight, and used it to slow her fall. I scrambled across the walkway and made my way down as fast as I could.

  When I got to the bottom I went straight to the APC and buckled myself in, leaning back and letting out a long breath.

  Gellen: I think I’m just going to stay in the APC for the rest of the day. Maybe no more boss fights until tomorrow, yeah?