I still had a shitload of preparations to make before we had our final showdown with the Franchisor, but I felt wrung out and exhausted on an almost cellular level. Tromping through the Gluttonarium had drained my soul in ways I couldn’t quite articulate, and the battle against the Hungry Hippos had been more than just physically taxing. So, instead of being productive, I decided to veg out on the couch with an entire pizza and a six-pack of ice-cold brews.

  Croc joined me, curling up on one end of the sofa while I turned on an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, season 3 on DVD. The mimic wanted to watch New Moon for the gajillionith time, but for the sake of my mental health, we’d agreed to take turns picking the show. At some point, I passed out and woke up hours later with a sore neck, pizza crumbs sprinkled across my chest, and a half-eaten slice of za still in one hand.

  The rest of the pizza was gone, the empty box discarded on the floor near Croc’s slumbering form.

  The TV had turned to a patch of white static, and I quietly turned it off, before making a quick pit stop to brush my teeth and splash a little water across my face.

  I was still drained, but when I slid into my bed, sleep refused to come. An incessant onslaught of worries and fears spun through my mind, and whenever I got close to passing out, the faces of dead Aspirants would float to the surface of my thoughts, startling me awake. Sometimes I saw Natasha, other times it was the nameless shitheads I’d burned alive back in the bog. After an hour without any success, I finally stopped trying.

  I left Croc snoring on the couch, slipped out of the room, and made my way down to the Soul Forge. I half expected to find Jakob puttering around, but the place was blessedly empty, which was great because I had work to do and didn’t need any distractions.

  Despite Sinclair’s advice, I really didn’t feel like talking through things with Jakob just yet. What we’d done in the 10,000 Acre Wood had been necessary—no matter what the Cendral thought. Eventually, he and I would need to have a real come to Jesus meeting about everything that had happened, but for now I pushed my feelings away and focused on the task at hand.

  The first thing I needed to do was spend a little time leveling my core Relics, including Frostfang Spire—which was still only at level 5—Neural Slipstream at level 12, and Psychic Sovereignty, which was stuck at 10.

  Using the Ponzi Scheme Essence Transference Circle, I quickly pushed Frostfang up to level 10, unlocking a new secondary ability called Arctic Feedback Loop. Whenever an enemy shattered one of my conjured ice spikes, it would release a blast of freezing air, dealing a flat 25 points of frost damage and instantly adding a stack of Frostbite Foreplay.

  The final capstone ability for Psychic Sovereignty damn near left me drooling.

  I wanted to kick my own ass for not unlocking it sooner. Monarch of Momentum worked off the same principle as the Bowling Ball of Rolling Momentum—except applied to literally everything. Once activated, anything I hurled with Psychic Sovereignty just kept accelerating, building speed the longer it stayed in motion. Given enough time and distance, I could turn my hammer into a railgun, or my demolition screwdriver into a javelin missile.

  Instead of having one Bowling Ball of Rolling Momentum, I could have as many as I wanted, all in different shapes and sizes. A skill like that would scale as I progressed and could exponentially increase the damage my tools could do.

  As for the last, maxing out Neural Slipstream unlocked yet another passive capstone ability called Slip Sync. It was an active secondary ability that allowed me to extend the effects of Neural Slipstream to a single ally within a ten-meter radius. The ally would gain all the same benefits I did, and there were no obvious downsides. At least none I could spot, which meant it had the potential to be either a game-breaking godsend or the quickest way to make a teammate vomit themselves inside out.

  Either way, it could be a lifesaver when things went sideways.

  With that all squared away, I finally turned to the next big project on my to-do list: forging the Tome of the Swarm Herald Emblem.

  A small part of me still wanted to wait. Once I pulled the trigger, there was no undoing it, and odds were pretty damn good that someone called the Franchisor had a Relic tied to summoning. But killing the Franchisor wasn’t going to be easy, and if I kept holding out, waiting for the perfect setup, I’d end up dead. Or worse, one of my friends would, all because I’d been too greedy or chickenshit to do what needed doing.

  Perfect was the enemy of good, I reminded myself, and good would just have to be good enough.

  I’d already systematically maxed out the core components needed to craft the Emblem, though there was one final adjustment I wanted to make first. Swarm Tactics was a powerful Rare-grade Relic that boosted Athleticism, Toughness, and Health Regeneration for each additional creature I summoned to the battlefield, while Army of One did exactly the same thing, except for the summoner. I figured there had to be a way to smash those two together.

  The problem was, the two Relics were essentially opposites of one another.

  I needed a way to link them—a conduit, to get the best of both worlds. And I thought there might be a way to pull that off.

  Back down on the 75th floor, I’d looted an Uncommon Relic called Hive Link, which allowed Drekhnaar Drones within 50 meters of one another to share a quarter of their total Health and Mana Pools. And when one Drone died, the surviving members of the Link gained a stack of Hive Frenzy, increasing Attack and Movement Speed by 15% for 30 seconds. When I added Hive Link into the mix, the overall synergy levels shot up from 54% to 87%, finally making the Relic viable.

  E Pluribus Unum

  Rare Relic – Level 5 (Fully Tempered)

  Range: 50 Meters

  They say there is strength in numbers, and hol-ee shit did you take that literally.

  When more than two creatures are summoned within fifty meters of one another, every single one of them, including you, gains a 5% boost to Athleticism, Toughness, and Health Regeneration, plus a fat, juicy stack of Collective Outrage. And that is only the beginning. Every extra minion you drag kicking and screaming onto the battlefield piles on another 2% boost and one more stack of Collective Outrage, pumping their fetid veins full of rage-fueled murder juice.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The result is a snowballing, many-limbed nightmare of synchronized violence. A legion of teeth and steel, frothing at the mouth and looking for something, anything, to eviscerate. And whenever one of your summoned beasties bites the dust within line of sight, you automatically heal for 10% of Max Health. Great news for you. Terrible news for your minions. Each death also adds on another Stack of Collective Outrage, pushing your Swarm that much closer to losing their shit.

  Just be warned, when Collective Outrage gets too high—relative to your Grit—the Swarm stops giving a shit about little things like “friend” and “foe.” They’ll happily chew through you, your allies, your mom, your pet goldfish, and anything else that happens to be standing nearby. So go ahead—summon big, summon fast, summon often. Just don’t be surprised if the thing that ends up killing you is your own unstoppable army.

  This Relic enables Mana usage.

  It was almost perfect, though once again I reminded myself that perfect was the enemy of good. It did everything I wanted, but still had the same drawback as Swarm Tactics.

  Collective Outrage was a double-edged sword that could kill us all if I wasn’t careful. But the risk would be offset by adding the Will of Iron Relic into the Emblem, which granted the user absolute control over all summoned minions or enthralled creatures, regardless of any Afflictions or Debuffs that might otherwise interfere.

  I had to figure that included things like Collective Outrage.

  Overall, I was happy with the outcome. But instead of forging the three right away, I leveled up Army of One and Hive Link first, pushing one to seven and the other to eight. The logic was simple—when Relics fused, their respective levels averaged out, and it was way cheaper to pump them up at the lower tiers. When I finally forged all three, my shiny new E Pluribus Unum automatically started at level 10.

  It didn’t take long to max the new Relic out. Once that was done, I spent another hour or so making duplicate copies of each of the Relics—just in case I needed them for later—then all that was left to do was forge the Emblem.

  Resonant Mana Signature Detected!

  Would you like to Forge Eldritch Taxidermist (Fabled, Fully Tempered – Level 15), Sleepwalker (Fabled – Level 15), E Pluribus Unum (Fabled, Fully Tempered – Level 15), Will of Iron (Rare – Level 15), Form FleshTron, Go! (Rare – Level 15), Collective Consciousness (Rare – Level 15), Drone Zone (Rare – Level 15), and Voodoo Doppelbanger (Rare – Level 15) into a new Emblem?*

  Yes/No?

  My heart raced as I pulled up the research report, praying that I’d done enough to ensure success.

  Researcher’s Codex Compatibility Analysis

  Based on historic data sets and extensive Forging models, the Codex Analytics Model predicts that attempting to combine the designated Relics into a unifying Emblem has an 89% chance of success, meaning the number of possible Emblem Iterations is Low. The most probable outcome is Tome of the Swarm Herald (Fabled Emblem) or a closely adjacent derivative. Would you like to proceed?

  Yes/No?

  I breathed a sigh of relief. There were no warnings about underpowered configurations or unstable Relics—as far as I could tell, it was green lights across the board.

  This had been a long time in the making, and I felt like I was on the edge of a cliff, staring down at a fathomless darkness below. Once I did this, the Emblem would be locked. No going back. It was a tremendous risk, but it was also a stepping stone to real power. The Flayed Monarch probably had an entire Spatial Core filled with Mythic or Fabled Emblems, and if I wanted to compete on that level, I needed to follow suit.

  Hands shaking, I selected Yes.

  When forging most Relics, there was a flash of light and heat.

  This was different.

  This was a supernova of metaphysical power.

  Blinding light and an oppressive wave of blistering energy washed through the room. The walls groaned and the floor trembled as if the Backrooms struggled to contain the raw power of my new creation.

  The light swelled until it felt like my skull was full of molten glass. Every nerve ending lit up, buzzing in manic harmony as the Relics melted together. A swirling vortex of Mana raged around me, before collapsing inward like a dying star, forming into something denser, sharper, hungrier.

  A sound rose with the terrible whirlwind of light and heat—buzzing at first, then building into a full chorus. It wasn’t coming from outside. It was inside me. The voices of every Horror, Doppelbanger, Drone, and stitched-together nightmare I’d ever conjured, all vibrating inside my bones like a tuning fork. For a terrible moment, I felt myself dissolving, the line between creator and creation blurring, until it was impossible to know where one ended and the other began.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the light guttered and died, taking the heat with it as the legion of screaming voices fell silent. The light collapsed fully, and where an amalgamation of Relics had been before, only a single item remained.

  With a name like Tome of the Swarm Herald, I half expected the new Emblem to look like some cursed grimoire, bound in stitched flesh and inked with runes that bled.

  Instead, what I got was a laminated, double-sided diner menu—the exact kind you’d find at a greasy spoon off I-75 at three in the morning. Only the entrées weren’t Flapjacks and Omelets, Biscuits and Burgers. No, this one listed out all my Relics with some diner appropriate titles: The Eldritch Horror Hot Plate, The Drone Zone Special, The Will of Iron Gut Busting Burger.

  Tome of the Swarm Herald

  Fabled Emblem

  The Backrooms are filled with broken things. Broken people, broken machines, broken flesh. Most walk past it. The Swarm Herald doesn’t. To them, every scrap is potential. Every corpse is a chassis. Every nightmare is a spare part waiting to be bolted on.

  Part necromancer, part grease-stained mechanic, the Swarm Herald is less a summoner and more a foreman presiding over a never-ending factory of meat and metal. Every claw, every cog, every stitched-together jaw is another limb of their growing war machine. When the swarm moves, it moves as one. When it kills, it kills as one. And when it dies, it is repurposed, reforged, and returned to the fight.

  The true power of the Swarm Herald isn’t in any single summoned creature, it is the strength of the collective. One Horror is disposable. Ten are dangerous. A hundred are unstoppable.

  The more the Swarm Herald summons, the stronger they become. Their army is their armor. The swarm is their salvation. Each body fortifies their defenses, amplifies their strength, and deepens their reach until the battlefield itself trembles in terror. If you hear the grinding of gears, the buzz of drones, or the shuffle of mismatched feet in the dark—pray it isn’t coming your way. Because once the swarm sets eyes on you, you’re not an enemy.

  You’re inventory.

  I grinned as I added it to my Spatial Core and felt a wave of searing power surge through me. I knew I still couldn’t go toe-to-toe with the Flayed Monarch or any of the other Sovereigns, but I was one step closer. And with this in my arsenal, the Franchisor was gonna have a very bad day.

  The last thing on my list was topping off my spell cards and rebuilding my roster of Horrors.

  The battle with the Hungry, Hungry Hippos had certainly taken a hefty toll, but all of my Necromarshals had survived the encounter, and I still had tons of corpses filling the freezer. I spent a few hours mixing and matching body parts, replacing arms and legs and molding flesh like clay, all while adding in tech salvaged from the VRD labs on the 75th floor.

  By the time I was finished, I had five Doorway Sentinels, the three members of my Rat Pack, a full dozen Sunnysiders—an equal mix of Kevins and Kathys—eight Kannibal Kids, ten Yetis, two War Dogs, and a full complement of Necromarshals to command the swarm.

  All that was left to do now was kill the Franchisor, though I had a feeling that was going to be a hell of a lot easier said than done.