Croc turned and rushed into the onslaught, tentacles snatching up furry critters by the bucketload, then shoving them into its snapping stomach maw.
“Croc, catch!” I hollered, fishing one of the Chimera Kibble Treats free from the bag before hurling it at the dog. The mimic lurched upward, snatching it from the air, then devoured it in a single bite. Ice erupted across the mimic’s body, jagged shards jutting from its back and shoulders as frost poured outward in a creeping wave, slowing the rabid creatures or freezing them solid where they stood.
The dragon lunged again, propelled by powerful legs, and Snow White’s head struck like a cobra, plucking the mimic from the ground. Razor-sharp teeth attempted to chew through Croc’s hide, but the icy armor held, and veins of frost spread across her face and began to worm down the neck. She shook the mimic like a chew toy, then flung Croc’s limp form away with a disgusted flick of her jaws.
Pooh appeared in a heartbeat, moving with a speed I didn’t know the little guy possessed. The bear swelled in size, cushioning the mimic’s fall with his giant stuffed belly.
“Christopher,” the bear pleaded as he gently set Croc down on the cracked tiles. “Just stop all of this. It’s not too late…”
Oz’s colossal face winced, the motion almost human. “You know that isn’t true. Don’t watch this part, Pooh. Better to just look away…”
Temp and Rudolpho were already hacking away at the stained-glass window featuring Captain Marvelous, while Harper had finally managed to smash through the Burger Baron’s pane with a little added assistance from my whirlwind of tools.
As the window erupted in a flash of dazzling light, a new stump swelled from the opposite side of Steamboat Willie’s neck. It stretched and warped, solidifying into a grinning clown face, covered in a thick layer of white greasepaint. A bulbous red ball sat on the end of his nose and a cheap paper crown—a mirror version of the one I wore on my head—rested on tufts of fiery red hair.
Fuck me.
With each phylactery we destroyed, the dragon—which wasn’t really a dragon at all, but rather a brand-sponsored hydra—grew more vulnerable but twice as deadly.
“Heya kiddos,” the Baron screeched, the sound a bomb blast in my ears. “Time for some fun and games! Who wants to get supersized?”
The clown swiveled toward Jakob—his Broken Car Alarm still shrieking at full blast as he hurled glowing vials from the bandolier slung across his chest. The disgusting clown spewed a boiling beam of liquid grease directly at the Cendral, but Jakob dropped to a knee and took cover behind his dual shields. The scalding hot oil splattered outward in an arc like water ricocheting off a spoon, spraying a nearby Yeti in the process.
The fryer grease sizzled through matted fur, eating straight into the skin beneath. At the same time, the Horror began to swell grotesquely, layer after layer of fat piling on until he was so bloated he could barely move. In a matter of seconds, the fur-clad monster looked like a giant, half-burned tater tot, just waiting for some giant hand to pluck him from the bottom of a greasy fast-food bag.
Captain Marvelous’s windowpane screamed as Temp and Rudolpho tag-teamed it—hoof, blade, hoof, blade—until the glass webbed, then blew out in a white-hot starburst.
The far side of Willie’s neck bulged once again. Yellow scales and veins of living ink crawled across the swelling flesh. The neck emerged with a rubbery pop, and a square-jawed superhero head shouldered its way into the world—black pompadour perfect, smile weaponized, eyes burning red like twin jet engines.
“Watch out!” I yelled, though no one seemed to hear me over the din of battle and the chorus of screams.
A pair of scarlet lances ripped across the chamber, vaporizing one of the War Dogs and leaving nothing but ash before bisecting a Kannibal Kid cleanly from clavicle to crotch, both halves sliding apart like deli meat as his ruined corpse toppled to the floor. The beam swerved right, this time aimed directly at Croc, who was still busy dealing with the feral forest critters skittering across the floor.
Jakob saw the threat and moved, triggering Bullrush Blitz as he raced forward in a burst of superhuman speed. He slid to a stop and brought his shields to bear, dropping to a knee and bracing himself for the impact. I’d seen those shields deflect damned near everything, including a concentrated blast from a VRD Plasma Cannon.
This time, things were different.
The glowing blue plasma shield held, but Captain Marvelous’s laser eyes carved straight through Jakob’s tower shield, shredding the reinforced steel like wet two-ply. Then the beam kept going, slicing through the arm beneath. Jakob roared once, defiant even in the face of certain death, before the light chewed through his chest. For a heartbeat Jakob was a statue, a perfect representation of man, shield, and fury—and then the top half of him slid off the bottom.
Jakob hit the ground in two clean slabs, his Health bar suddenly at zero.
I froze, shocked into inaction at what I was seeing.
My friend, dead and lifeless on the floor.
This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end.
“Harper!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs. “We need a medic!”
The healer pirouetted midair, eyes locking on the dead Cendral. I saw a flash of pain and grief ripple across her features and the look told me everything I needed to know. She didn’t have the kind of healing magic necessary to fix him. She dove toward his corpse anyway, wings buzzing with frantic motion as she dodged around encroaching monkeys and dove beneath laser beams and gouts of flesh-melting fryer grease.
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She slid to a stop beside him and immediately activated Warranty Void if Broken while she pulled out a Greater Zima. I could see the look of utter defeat on her face even through the opalescent dome enveloping her.
But before she could even press the bottle against his lifeless lips, Jakob’s body began to spasm and vibrate. Arms and legs flailed wildly as golden light, so radiant it momentarily bleached the shadows from the walls, leaked from the two halves of his severed torso. His upper half snapped upright with a ragged gasp, blood evaporating as his legs slid across the floor and fused back together. His missing arm still lay on the ground four or five feet to his right, but against all the odds he was somehow alive and breathing.
He shook his head and flopped onto his back, laughing like a maniac.
That’s when it hit me. He had Overdraft Protection equipped—the built-in fail-safe that would bring him back from the dead. Though it had a month-long cooldown, which meant he wouldn’t be so lucky the next time.
Harper didn’t even question the sudden miracle.
Instead, she grabbed his severed arm and shoved it against the bleeding stump before pushing the Zima into Jakob’s free hand. He chugged the potion and the magic went to work, restoring his missing health while skin and muscle fibers knit the arm back in place.
I turned to the last stained-glass window—the one with the Starbies Harpy leering down at us. Rudolpho hammered at it with hooves and antlers while Temp jabbed her sword at the glass. The HP bar hovered just under twenty percent, but this one was holding out longer than the rest.
I locked onto the window and cast Hydro Fracking Blast, activating Stone Splitter to boost the raw piercing power. The torrent drilled a hole clean through, cracks like lightning bolts racing across its surface. Temp swung a heartbeat later, her blade splitting the weakened pane apart. The window blew outward in a glittering storm of shards—and with the last of Oz’s phylacteries gone, the hydra was no longer untouchable.
Still tough as an artillery cannon, sure, but not invincible.
Just like before, a new stump ballooned outward from the hydra’s body, the Starbies Harpy’s head unspooling from a twisting column, her head dangling on a too-long neck. Stringy green hair clung to her gaunt skull like pond scum, and her eyes were dull and lifeless, a tarnished crown sitting askew on the top of her head. Rows of serrated teeth caught the light as her face split in a malicious grin.
The hydra—now fully formed—reared back, all five heads shrieking in discord, before it came crashing back to the ground.
The tiles split beneath the impact and a ripple of silvery light blasted outward in a wall of raw, unstoppable force, too fast to dodge. Every Horror still standing was flattened on the spot, their Health bars cut by a brutal twenty-five percent apiece. Jakob and Harper were both still protected by Warranty Void if Broken, but Croc wasn’t so lucky. The wave hit like a freight train, hurling the mimic across the room, its googly eyes rolling in opposite directions.
I didn’t fare much better.
The wave of light extended upward, nearly brushing the ceiling, and it caught me in midair, smashing my chest and temporarily disrupting my psychic threads. I pinwheeled, careened into the wall, and dropped like a sack of wet concrete. White stars skipped across my vision as I coughed up blood. My ribs ached like fire, and it felt like something was broken inside my chest.
A second later, Temperance and Rudolpho came crashing to the ground beside me, landing in a sprawl of limbs with enough force to crater the floor. Temp tried to rise, lips pulled back in a snarl, limbs trembling, but collapsed a second later.
It wasn’t hard to guess why as a combat notification flashed across my vision.
You have been stunned and are unable to move for ten seconds!
For a terrifying moment, the whole party was down—every one of us caught in the aftershock of the AoE attack. The hydra loomed, shadow blotting out the dome overhead, five heads weaving in predatory synchronization, ready to pick us off one by one.
And there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it.
While we lay there—vulnerable and exposed—the Harpy opened her mouth and her throat began to bulge and distend. She unleashed a billowing brown haze that rolled through the chamber like an exhaust cloud, reeking of scorched espresso beans.
The instant it hit my skin, the burning started. Searing every pore like I’d been dunked in acid. I desperately tried to hold my breath—to force the cloud away with psychic tethers—but it clawed its way into my nose and mouth, filling me with a bitter heat as my HP bar began to drop. The toxic haze chewed me up from the inside, searing my esophagus and lungs, every breath choking and painful.
My health finally stabilized at 60% but the damage wasn’t the only thing the cloud did. Another prompt appeared, even more unwelcome than the last one.
You have been Afflicted with Type 1 Diabetes! Duration, 5:00 minutes.
- Sugar Crash – -20% Stamina Regen. Sudden exhaustion hits at random intervals.
- Insulin Dependency – All Healing Elixirs and Spells are 75% less effective.
- Neuropathy – Creeping numbness in feet and hands.
- Vision Blur – -25% Accuracy and complimentary Eye Floaters?.
Perfect. Just fucking perfect.
Not only was I being boiled alive in coffee steam, now my hands felt like they were wrapped in rubber gloves, my vision was a blur, and every healing potion and spell in the world had just been nerfed.
Through the swirling haze, the Harpy’s grin widened, teeth gleaming. She was already inhaling again, throat bubbling as she prepared to release another toxic cloud. We needed to shut that shit down fast or none of us were likely to survive this battle.
The stun effect finally lapsed, and I managed to gain my feet.
“Focus on her!” I roared, swatting at a winged monkey that dove out of the steam with a machete raised high. My hammer caught it across the skull, splitting bone with a satisfying crack. “Bring her down before we all end up on permanent dialysis!”
The dome around Harper and Jakob faded as the initial coffee cloud dissipated and the healer opened up with a burst of Shadow Ops Eagle. A pair of inky black birds burst from the end of her staff and slammed into the Harpy.
I unloaded with ice javelins and bursts of Hydro Fracking Blast. With Stone Splitter in effect, it ate through more Mana, but that was the one thing I had plenty of, and the beams of water drilled through scales and the HP bar above the hydra began to gradually drop a fraction of an inch at a time. The bubble was still building in the Harpy’s throat, and I knew we didn’t have long before she triggered the noxious cloud again.
Mind racing, I decided to pull the same trick on her that I’d used on Croc back at the Gluttonarium.
I reached out with Hydrokinesis, forming a watery ball gag before freezing it in place. That stopped the spell dead in its tracks, though the other heads were none too happy about it. Captain Marvelous let loose with twin laser beams and I threw myself into a dive, avoiding the blast by inches. A molten geyser of grease, courtesy of the Burger Baron, was waiting for me, but one of my Horrors intercepted the attack, shielding me from the blow.
The hydra roared in fury and flapped its wings, unleashing another burst of hurricane force wind.
I wasn’t ready for it and the gust swept me from my feet, hurling me backward like a plastic bag caught in a tornado. I didn’t even see the shimmering black and white portal that had appeared directly behind me until it was too late.