"Geeuleun!"

Darryl quickly turned around just in time to see a massive tongue lash out to him. It hit him square in the chest, immediately sticking to him like a massive moist piece of gum and dragging him back with inhuman strength.

Darryl screamed as his feet left the ground and a breeze of stale air rushed passed him. Then his scream stopped suddenly, as did the torque of the pull. And all other movement, really. The world literally froze.

Taking this time to collect himself, Darryl traced the origins of the tongue back to a 2.5m tall gecko in an office lady uniform. She was dressed up almost as a caricature of strict office women, with a stereotypical office tyrant black bun wig on her head and the small pointy glasses that all the stern female teachers and librarians in the movies wear. As her gecko eyes stuck a good 30cm out of her skull, the glasses that were balancing on the ridge of her nose served no purpose.

Most noticeable about her was the knife, though. It was stabbed into her face near her nostril, being the freshest of various wounds on her face. Her uniform was covered in her blood, and one of her hands was missing two fingers. Above her floated a deep red blip.

A mug shot of his own face appeared in front of Darryl, showing his name and level. Next to it a large Versus splattered, followed by a name in a blood-splattered metallic font. Underneath it appeared the regular descriptive text, being announced by the same enthusiastic voice.

Grey Corpora Assistant Manager!

Level 8 Neighbourhood Boss!

Though the lowest station allowed to command other corpora, the assistant manager is still allowed to bully the lowly salary slaves with more work and unreasonable demands of fast yet flawless work. If the slaves don’t oblige, the AM tosses these slackers around with their tongue and occasionally motivates them after they bludgeoned them a little. Most of the time the poor victim doesn’t survive the treatment, though!

Jang-Mi here has gotten a lowly position even amongst assistant managers, being assigned crappy interns and the kind of irrelevant work that renders this position a career dead end for her. Without a chance of promotion or change of scenery, only her corporate bullying remains. And a new victim for that treatment has just presented himself…

Just as suddenly as it stopped, time resumed again. With a jolt Darryl moved closer towards the monstrously large lady again, and then skidded across the floor. He awkwardly stopped himself halfway the corridor as the tongue rapidly returned to its owner’s mouth a good five metres away.

The lady gecko gagged, spitting out bits of woolf wool and gunk but with most of it clinging to her tongue as persistently as it was still clinging on to him. Darryl didn’t wait for her to overcome the taste and quickly looked around for a weapon. Not seeing anything, he grabbed a screen and held it out like a shield while he retreated to the nearest corner.

Where he was greeted by the grisly sight of another corpse. A human one this time.

Corpse of Crawler Nephele J. Lvl2

You cannot loot corpses with the inventory system before completing the tutorial.

The woman was somewhere in her thirties, dressed normally in a somewhat fashionable winter coat and pants but with oddly fantasy-like gloves and a top hat that had fallen off of her head. There was a stain of saliva on her side, and her face was crumpled up unrecognisably from some kind of heavy impact. Her left arm was twisted with bone shards sticking out, and half of her left leg was missing.

It was… It was a gruesome sight indeed. While he was already glad that his unhygienic appearance freed him before, he was extremely glad that the gecko couldn’t toss him around now.

"Dasi il!"

Darryl quickly resumed running when he heard the gecko scream something at him, bending over to quickly pick up the top hat but not risking to slow down for anything else. He was sure he saw her come around the corner when he jumped around the next, but didn’t wait to find out and dashed around two more before he stopped.

Darryl panted and looked at the top hat he picked up. The announcer spoke with an intentionally bad posh British accent as he gave the description.

Fancy top hat

Earthlings consider this a fancy status symbol for some reason. It makes no sense, there’s better designs to be taller with the same amount of cloth and it doesn’t look that impressive or expensive. Then again, human fashion has always been rather questionable.

Wearing this top hat will ruin the decently balanced look you’ve got going for you now, but grants you +1 Charisma anyway.

Charisma? Not sure what that entailed, but it didn’t sound that useful in this situation. Darryl dropped the top hat for now and skulked to the next corner.

The room wasn’t actually that big, but the chaos made it very hard to oversee. There were four rows of five cubicles each and a larger desk on a slight elevation on the opposite side of the door from which he came. But with the stacks of paper making the cubicles almost as good cover as a wall, even the limited area he had was quite sufficient to lose the gecko lady in.

But that went both ways, and the gecko lady seemed just as disinclined to give away her position now that she didn’t see him.

There were more of the Gecko interns further away from the door, frantically typing away and ignoring him completely. The adventurer he saw before must’ve only killed the ones in the row closest to the door before she triggered the boss battle.

Darryl ignored the geckos, trying to hear through their typing and looking around for something better than the monitor he was still holding. It hadn’t just been unplugged, the thing didn’t even have any cables to begin with. Yet the screen shone dimly, and Darryl didn’t see a button to turn it off at first glance.

He tossed it under one of the abandoned desks, deciding that the light giving away his location was a bigger issue than the weapon had potential. It had a rather flimsy design, after all, and a poor handhold. And the next row had a corpse that might have something better.

Corpse of Crawler Jorge T. Lvl1

You cannot loot corpses with the inventory system before completing the tutorial.

He had been tossed through two cubicles, breaking the wall that separated them, before crashing into a third one. One of the cubicles had a gecko intern still working in it, who had simply picked up his broken screen and continued working. The intern was glued to the screen like all the others, despite half of it being static with the occasional sparks coming off of it.

Where the woman had been rendered unrecognisable during her death, the terrified agony of this man’s last moments had not been erased. Eyes wide and mouth agape, the chest wound suggested he had been finished off in close-range rather than dying in the collision. Scary.

He looked Greek. The woman might’ve been as well, though Darryl couldn’t tell with her. But this man seemed to be in his fifties, slightly overweight, wearing glasses that were now shattered and with the frame twisted, and not at all the kind of person you’d expect to enter this place. Darryl wondered what had driven him to come in.

It didn’t matter right now, though. What mattered was that the man was still clenching his weapon in his right hand. The fire poker was already bent and covered in rat gunk, but it was still better than nothing.

He didn’t seem like he had anything else of value on him. Where the woman had two odd items on her, he had nothing but the improvised weapon. Darryl took a moment of silence to mourn the stranger and closed the man’s eyes, only for them to immediately pop open again. He tried again, with the same result. Weird and creepy, eyes always closed so easily in the movies.

Ignoring the eyes for now, at least ignoring them the best he could, Darryl started to wrench the fire poker from his clasped hand. The fingers were tensed up, but not as rigid as he expected. And surprisingly enough, the body was still warm.

As Darryl was trying to pull free the man’s middle finger, he heard it and immediately threw himself to the side.

"Hyusig Eobs-eum!"

It was a good thing that the gecko shouted something in her weird alien language whenever she saw him, or Darryl would’ve been dead right now. Instead she pounced on the dead crawler, her ridiculously long dyed-red nails sinking deep into the corpse’s flesh.

The size of those nails and the way they sank into the crawler like a machete through butter left no doubt on whether that pounce would’ve killed him. It would have. It so would have killed him twice over.

Darryl needed half a second to regain his wits, but then lunged for the knife sticking out of the lady gecko’s face. It was both an obvious weapon and likely to injure her a lot if he could push it deeper or pull it out. And right now, he desperately needed both.

The gecko on the other hand needed neither, and turned her face away from him the moment he reached out. With her massive size she easily moved the handle out of his reach, and began to pull her nails out of the corpse’s flesh. Though her hands were currently lodged in the crawler, granting him the second and a half he since used up, they clearly weren’t actually stuck. Not with the inhuman strength she seemed to possess.

So Darryl ran. Of course he ran. He rolled off the cubicle, scrambled and crawled undignified for a short stretch but kept moving as fast as he could to get away from this monster.

The gecko lady shouted something else, and Darryl heard the sound of plastic shattering as her nails slashed through the cubicle wall where he had been but moments before. He kept running.

When he heard a slurping sound, he quickly stopped and turned around though. It was one of the base survival tactics he had realised he should use while running away from her before. He couldn’t turn his back to her. Not when it wasn’t covered with woolf gunk like his front was.

Darryl shuddered at the thought. Had he not immediately turned around when she first appeared, he would’ve been dead before he even knew what was going on.

He wasn’t going to make that mistake now, either. Without stopping or slowing down first, Darryl turned around and awkwardly tried to run backwards fast enough to maintain his momentum without falling.

And to his surprise, he didn’t see a slimy tongue come at him. Instead the gecko lady looked away from him, her tongue lashing out to an alien brand coffee machine and reeling it back in. With a mighty twist of her neck she redirected the tongue’s direction straight at him, and then the coffee machine dislodged.

She wasn’t bulls-eye accurate, fortunately, but Darryl still had to dodge to the left. The coffee can shattered against the wall while the machine half-crumpled in on itself on impact. Almost immediately, as if programmed to do so, several voices began to wail in that strange gecko language.

The intern in this row was one of the voices, and he immediately turned away from his cracked screen to shout at the ceiling while clasping his head in an overacted mockery of anguish. From the sound of it, the other remaining interns no doubt did the same.

The gecko lady immediately turned towards the gecko and shouted something at him, which he ignored. She then slashed him across the face, making his dot turn yellow and shutting him up. He immediately turned back to his screen and started to type even more frantically than before.

By the time that she turned back to Darryl, he was no longer there. She shouted something and started patrolling again. When he heard another wailing intern go silent, he knew that she was making her rounds to return them to work. Reasonably sure that this meant she wasn’t going to come back to this row any time soon, Darryl crawled out from underneath the cubicle.

This was troublesome. The knife seemed like the obvious and easy answer to end this, and he had been presented the perfect opportunity to grab it. Yet the boss had been much faster and savvier than he expected.

What was worse, she seemed to be slowly regaining her health. The dark red blip above her head had since turned slightly less red. She still looked terrible, but that mattered little for her health pool he assumed.

Not only was he trapped in here with a monster both faster and smarter than he expected, with no weapons to fight her and his own stamina running out after more than just this one close brush with death. No, apparently he was on a bit of a time crunch as well.

Yet, all wasn’t lost. That last attack of hers had shown a possibility, a hint of defeating her. It was a long shot, but an idea began to form.