Cascadia was furious. Not only had we not been shown on the premiere, none of the featured crawlers had been anywhere near our power level. One defeat of a borough boss was shown, but it didn’t even begin to compare with our battle in terms of excitement. It was just a large group of people with machine guns shooting at a huge spider shaped robot from behind cover until it died.

  We had gotten up a little early and traveled to a training guild to watch the show.

  “What the fuck Jasper! What is this bullshit? You said to do exciting things to make the show. Nothing on that show even came close to what we did yesterday!”

  “I don’t know Cascadia! They don’t tell us what is going to make the program! I only know what I’ve seen in reruns. Maybe they are trying to build up over the first floor and don’t want to set the bar too high too early, I don’t know! There are 12 million crawlers running around, maybe the show writers just didn’t notice you yet, or maybe they are building up certain story lines.”

  I stayed out of it, thinking about the episode and trying to discover hints about this season and pondering the strange sensation of desperately wanting to eat but not being hungry. I looked at the borough field guide, deciding what order to hit the mobs in after training. Other than obtaining some powerful early rewards, which we had already done, my first floor goal was just to level as hard as possible so that we could focus on other things when we got to the second floor. Cascadia had other plans it seemed.

  “Gel, get out your drone and go find the city boss. We are going to take things up a notch.”

  Jasper was practically begging.

  “Please Cascadia, city bosses are not meant to be fought on the first two floors. They are just set pieces! Traps! You WILL die if you try to fight one.”

  “That’s what you said about the borough boss too. We can power up a bit first but I think we can handle it.”

  “City bosses are orders of magnitude more powerful than borough bosses. You aren’t anywhere near powerful enough! Even if you had a dozen crawlers as powerful as you it would still be suicidal. And even if you succeeded, they could still decide not to put you on the show! Viewer feeds aren’t on yet! You can take all the crazy risks you want and if they don’t put you on the show no one will see it. At least wait until the next floor when the feeds are live,” Jasper pleaded.

  “I think Jasper is right on this one. The borough boss battle was close, and we don’t know if Parson would even help with a city boss fight. Lets just level up and take the easier boss fights and see what happens with the show for the next few days.”

  Cascadia begrudgingly agreed to wait for now and just focus on powering up. I was actually very concerned about not being on the show. Not because of the followers but because we should have been on it. That boss battle was perfect material and we were certainly among the most powerful crawlers in the dungeon. Them not putting us on the show was intentional. I suspected that I was under review. The notes that came with the past seasons of Dungeon Crawler World had said that this would happen at some point. They had also laid out the legal precedent that should protect me from overt retaliation but I had hoped to make it to the third floor without having to deal with it. That didn’t seem likely at this point.

  Cascadia and I spend the next hour training. The first thirty minutes was spent with me futilely trying to use my stun gauntlet to keep Cascadia out of the speeder. For the last thirty minutes we practiced what Cascadia called “tethering”. She would drop her adhesion disc into the speeder and throw herself around with it. We worked on maneuvers with us moving orthogonally where I could throw her in an arc but they were really complicated to pull off.

  Training over, we set off for a neighborhood that was free of other crawlers.

  Our second day in the dungeon went very smoothly. Between my surveys, the borough field guide, and the neighborhood maps we had excellent intelligence. We easily took down the neighborhood boss, an enormous squid eagle hybrid, just by letting the turret continuously attack it while we took cover and fended off its minions. We then cleared the entire neighborhood, which was populated with avian-cephalopod hybrids. Cascadia insisted we set a specific challenge for ourselves each den. On one den she only used her plasma discs while I only used my drone. On another, she used no weapons at all and I could only shoot mobs after she had thrown them to the ground. This ensured that a broad range of our skills leveled up, though it did slow our pace. Our pace was further reduced because we began to stow the speeder well in advance of any monster dens and approach on foot; many of the mobs had ranged attacks and we did not want to risk having to repair the speeder.

  The flow of rare achievements and powerful loot also slowed down. We continued to receive useful supplies but the weapons and equipable loot were all inferior to items we already had.

  As we were heading to a saferoom to end our day Parson messaged and asked if we could meet. He wanted to show us something and get some help with a neighborhood boss. We told him we would head over early the next day, after the second episode and daily announcements and our training.

  We met Parson in the noodle saferoom, which now looked more like a pharmaceutical lab than anything. There were beakers, tubes, and burners set up on tables spread across the entire room. There were also multiple sedated mobs piled in a corner.

  “Dude, where did you get all this stuff?” Cascadia asked as we entered the room. Parson looked up from his green sauce noodles and waved.

  “I brought a lot of it in with me, and then I got some more in loot boxes. I got some specific crafting tables my game guide says are even better than this setup, but I can’t use them till a later floor. How are you guys? Your level keeps climbing.”

  We had indeed gone up to level ten. Parson remained at six.

  “It’s how we are going to survive,” I said. “How are the noodles?”

  “Terrible. I just eat them to keep Tabby happy so I can use the space and borrow their stuff. I’d much rather have a nice ration bar.”

  “I hope you choke on them. What did you want to show us anyway?”

  “There’s a few things. Take a look at this.”

  He walked us over to one of his tables where a series of distillation tubes were dripping a black, oily substance into a collection beaker.

  “This is cephalopod-hybrid ink distillate. It is one of the key ingredients for a very popular CNS depressant that also has some bioenhancing effects. Apparently the neighboring city is run by cyborg reptiles; they use some sort of neuroactive injection to juice their eggs before they install the cybernetics. If you mix the juice with this ink distillate you get a super downer that leaves you feeling amazing when you wake up. I was hoping you two might be able to make your way to the next borough and bring me back some injection juice or some eggs. My squorse does not have great endurance.”

  “I’m telling you, terrestrial cephalopods make no sense,” Cascadia said. “We can probably make it over, this area is getting a little dry anyway. How did you figure this out? It’s only been a day and half.”

  “Turns out some of the smarter mobs can speak syndicate standard. I got friendly with some of them. Keep away from the squirrel-hybrids if you don’t mind. We are pretty chill now and I’m learning a lot from them. They trade with the cyborgs to get ingredients for the drugs which they then use to barter for nuts from the floating worms in the other neighboring borough. Or they did before us crawlers showed up at least. Anyhow they told me a lot of what I needed to know and the AI keeps giving me hints through the achievements and item descriptions.”

  I was listening carefully now. I was more interested in alcohol, which generally showed up on the second floor, but drugs were also a valuable dungeon commodity.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “What do you want them for?” I asked.

  “To use, of course. And to sell. My game guide says that money will be important later and the system AI has suggested I may be able to make a lot of money by selling pharmaceuticals."

  “We will get you the stuff. Split the product fifty fifty? How much do you need?”

  “Fifty fifty. I don’t know what the reaction is going to look like, so I can’t tell how much I’m going to be able to process before the floor ends. I guess I can bring it down to the next floor, so as much as you can carry sounds good. I’m sure glad there is a stairwell in the borough boss lair so I don’t have to spend time looking for one. Hey check this out too.”

  He walked us to another table covered in strange machinery I didn’t recognize. There was a small metal tin that he picked up.

  “Have you guys seen the eggs in some of the dens?”

  “Yeah, I put some in a mold aging box I got as a reward.”

  “A mold aging box? What kind of mold? What are you going to do with mold aged eggs?”

  “I don’t know. It says there are like a million different kinds and it picks the best ones based on what gets put in the box.”

  “Hey Tabby! What do you know about mold aged cephalopod eggs?”

  “Mold-aged cephalopod eggs are the keystone ingredient of the signature noodle dish of the Gavrelion people. The eggs are difficult to obtain and more difficult to prepare, with mistakes leading to deadly mycotoxin formation. As such the dish is extremely rare, though highly sought after by marine species food enthusiasts.”

  “How long till they are done?”

  “I don’t know, it just says it will tell me when it’s done.”

  “I’ll trade you for them, let me know when they are finished. Anyway, I collected a bunch of eggs. Like thousands of them; the squirrel folk were very accommodating. Turns out that you can get a minor buff to the regeneration skill by eating them. I figured that I could amplify the effect by concentrating the eggs, and some of the equipment I got in a pharmaceutical box had some tools that were perfect for the job. I used some jelly molds I brought in with me to finish the product. I even got an inventor achievement that gives me out of game money when other crawlers make and use it.”

  He opened the tin to reveal a pair of what looked like red jelly candies shaped like little squids.

  Parson’s Cephalopod Essence Jelly

  Type: Ingestible item

  Effect. When eaten grants the user level 20 regeneration for 30 seconds.

  This is what you get when you take an elite chemist turned drug dealer and introduce him to a bunch of talking squid-squirrels who use their eggs as a form of currency. The added cherry flavor does nothing to mask the unique fishy-gaminess of cephalopod-hybrid eggs.

  “Here, take one. It takes a lot of eggs to make one, so I only have two so far. I think some of the boss chambers have large egg stores, that's why I was hoping we could go take out one of the neighborhood bosses together.”

  “Nothing like a neighborhood boss fight to start off the day. Let’s do it,” Cascadia said, taking the jelly and putting it into a compartment on her utility belt.

  Parson rode his “squorse” alongside the speeder. It was much faster than traveling on foot but we were at about half our normal speed. He had gotten a saddle and some inventory expanding saddle bags as rewards for taming a mount and he wanted to bring them in case there was a lot of loot. Apparently his inventory was always full.

  It took us about an hour and a half to get to the ape-hybrid neighborhood. The boss chamber was similar to the one that had held The King; it looked like an exceptionally large zoo exhibit for monkeys. It was completely filled with thick, wooden climbing structures. We did the stupid dance and entered the enclosure. The standard boss sequence played out to an electrodrum beat. A group of small monkeys with laser edged boomerangs clustered in the branches and started chanting and screaming. The structure shook as a giant ape with six tentacle arms swung through the branches and roared before everything froze.

  Versus…

  George!Level 9 Neighborhood Boss!

  George is the big man in this neighborhood. That position comes with certain perks. But how did George attain such status? He outperformed all of his competitors at the thing monkeys and apes do best. What is that thing you ask? You should know, considering your own position on the phylogenetic tree. If you don't, well, you’re about to find out.

  The scene unfroze and we dove for cover as the mobs unleashed a volley. The small monkeys threw their boomerangs which clanked off of the large wooden poles we sheltered behind before rocketing back to their throwers. George did not throw a boomerang, instead he reached one of his tentacle arms behind him to catch an enormous bowel movement, cocked his arm back, and hurled it at us. The giant turd splattered against the pole, filling the air with putrid, wet particles that burned my skin and lungs. Parson appeared unaffected, but Cascadia and I started to take damage from being in the cloud.

  “Fuck this!” Cascadia said and dove from cover. She dodged a barrage of boomerangs as she found a new cover spot. I moved to follow but Parson stayed put.

  Parson: Lets split up for this one. I am immune to the poop attack I think. I will try to draw his attention

  I found different cover than Cascadia to shelter behind and deployed my turret. The small monkeys scattered, taking cover. Parson stepped out and unloaded a line of spikes from his living arm-cannon at George. George nimbly took cover, dropped another giant deuce and sent it straight towards Parson. Parson avoided a direct hit but was engulfed in a brown cloud.

  Cascadia took the opportunity to charge towards George. She dashed in his direction, bounding up branches as she went, reaching his level in seconds. She dove towards the branch he was on, igniting her psi-blade. Just before she reached him he turned his back, squirted out a cloud of aerosolized ink, and leaped away. Cascadia landed on the branch, completely blinded, and took a turd directly to the chest. She fell from the branch cursing. In the meantime, Jasper and I had taken out a few of the smaller monkeys, causing them to retreat. Cascadia hit her heal ability and an injector, bringing her back to full health as she sought better cover outside of George’s range.

  Cascadia: This is bullshit!

  Parson: Haha, good joke

  Cascadia: Shut up Parson. I’m going to hunt the little monkeys, you two figure out how to pin down George.

  Cascadia leapt into the branches. With her dexterity of sixteen her balance was remarkable and she leaped from branch to branch in stride, sliding along them and throwing her various ranged weapons at the little monkeys who fled at her approach. With the boomerang throwers distracted Parson started to move forward on George, firing spikes. I stayed back but sent my drone after him, harrying the boss with mini cannon fire. He was too fast for Parson to catch up to, hurling poop and retreating through the branches, but I easily paced him with the drone, slowly whittling away at his health.

  Parson was correct about the egg stores however and George began to run to bundles of eggs that were stored in branches, eating them and recharging his health.

  Parson: NOOOOO!!! We have to save the eggs!!!

  Cascadia swung around a branch and snatched the last monkey. She dropped to the ground and smashed it against the wall, crushing it. Still covered in shit, she turned to look at George. She pulled out her axe and extended it to maximum size. She stalked toward George, remaining on the ground, dodging his hurled feces. She suddenly rushed to the main pole supporting George's position and hewed with her axe, completely severing it. George leaped to another position, screaming and throwing poop but Cascadia pursued him relentlessly, chopping down pole after pole. His escape routes thinning, eventually George made a desperate maneuver, jumping down to attack Cascadia directly. She dodged backwards as he swung his six tentacles at her, trying to grapple her. Jasper hit him with a volley of needles and the poison took immediate effect. George grew sluggish, his movements slowing and his heath seeping. I sat back and folded my arms, wondering how Cascadia would decide to finish this one.

  Dropping the axe she dashed towards the boss, sliding under his attacks and between his legs. She threw her adhesion disc onto his back as she continued her slide, gaining some distance. George turned and began lumbering towards her. He jerked forwards suddenly as she activated her Gravitational Coupling skill. Simultaneously she jumped towards him, flying through the air propelled by both her own leap and the enhanced gravitational force. She executed a two footed drop kick, snapping George's head all the way back to bounce off his own spine. She wiped her hands off as the world froze.

  Winner!

  “I’d give that a five out of ten at best. You should have put one foot on him and pounded your chest.”

  “Oh fuck off Parson. I can’t focus on aesthetics when I am covered in literal shit. This is disgusting.”

  Parson tapped his respirator.

  “Got to get yourself one of these. Totally handles the smell.”

  “I said I can’t focus on aesthetics. Looking like a knock-off fuel station action figure kind of defeats the purpose. I’ll find another solution. When do we start getting benefactor boxes?”

  “I think Jasper said the fourth floor,” I offered.

  “Achievement fishing it is then,” she harrumphed.

  We helped Parson gather up bundles of eggs, they hung in long strings from the branches. We must have collected a thousand of them before Parson called it good and started ripping apart monkey corpses looking for some specific organ. We left him to it, agreeing to meet back at Tabaka’s saferoom sometime tomorrow with whatever we could find.