Then there was only the UI and the pain, showing his health bar steadily drop as several pop-ups and bars with information were visible where there should be naught but darkness. Darryl used his heal skill, feeling the flesh mend around the teeth that were still thrashing wildly to deal as much damage as they could. It wouldn’t last long, but his hand stopped shaking and his fingers obeyed him again.

He put the spear back in his inventory and took out his Formian trophy dagger, the still glowing lava on the blade illuminating but a soft hint of the scene of bugs swarming him. They clearly didn’t need light the way he did. They didn’t need a lava-covered dagger in the mouth either, but one of them got just that anyway.

It retreated, screaming and pulling the dagger out of his hand as it jerked away. Darryl didn’t contest it, letting go instead and summoning the spiked whacking stick. He slung it around, hitting several things but feeling the spikes harmlessly bounce or slide off.

Darryl threw his shield around, hoping to at least knock back a few krutnik. It almost immediately found resistance, and lacked the momentum to beat back the bug. Darryl instead hugged the shield close, feeling tibia strike at it in an attempt to get to him.

Cursing loudly, he dismissed the stick and summoned another torch instead. After frantically selecting Y the torch immediately re-illuminated the scene and Darryl ducked under the strike that would’ve taken his head. He pushed half a step forwards, toppling the bug that was awkwardly leaning against his shield to reach his head, and quickly retreated to have his back against the shimmering force field again. It gave way a bit, suggesting it was slowly running out. Too slow, though. Way too slow.

Darryl awkwardly flexed his bloody bicep to bring up his arm, jamming the torch in the face of the krutnik that was savaging his shoulder. There was no force behind it, he could barely even keep up the torch this high with the sorry state of his shoulder, but it was still fire.

The Krutnik screamed and the thrashing subsided some, but it was still clinging on. Darryl prevented two others from biting into him with his shield, but without them literally jumping against it he wasn’t doing any damage this way.

Darryl popped his health potion, bringing his health barely back to three quarters at the expense of another cooldown well over half an hour taking his last means of regeneration. His health bar immediately began declining again.

Darryl slammed himself to the right, the biting krutnik shrugging off being slammed into the wall and the impact instead driving one of its tibia into his side. Didn’t matter. The glob of acidic spit missed him, splashing onto the force field and seeping through in a very unnatural way after its momentum was resisted only partly. There was a hole in the force field now, widening slowly instead of the thing disappearing all at once.

The other two krutnik had, for all intents and purposes, been flailing over each other’s limbs until now. The force field wasn’t straight, instead Darryl was trapped in a 70 degree corner which his shield could almost fully cover. The krutnik biting into his shoulder effectively blocked the others from approaching him from the right, leaving them with no choice but pushing each other and his shield while tripping over the dead krutnik dead-spidering beneath their feet.

That changed the moment Darryl dodged to the right. One of the krutnik immediately scrambled forwards and bit into his leg. Darryl screamed and brought his shield down on its head. It ignored the metal, but couldn’t really shake its head in the awkward position that Darryl forced its body into. Its tongue still lashed out at the flesh it managed to bite into, and his health bar began to drop even faster. Already halfway empty again.

The reaver responsible for the acid attack jumped onto the back of the last gatherer, and opened its jaws for another attempt. Aiming for his head, it- screamed in pain.

Another magic missile struck from behind, this time hitting the reaver’s mount. The krutnik it had been standing on was the one with the lava knife in its throat, already putting it at a fifth of its health. The magic missile ripped through two of its legs and curved to tear off half its face. The reaver fell and failed to land feet first, instead falling into the mess of limbs that the corpses made.

The krutnik biting into Darryl’s shoulder decided that the torch was now becoming too much of a nuisance, and let go. Darryl shoved it off, and brought the torch down to burn off the other krutnik as well. The fire found it-

Then Darryl felt the teeth sink into his arm, deeper than before. He had pushed the krutnik into the wall, and it easily pushed itself back onto him. It bit into his arm just underneath his shoulder wound. Teeth were eagerly piercing through muscle and tendon. The krutnik allowed itself to hang from its teeth instead of clinging on to Darryl this time, and as its weight bore down on Darryl’s arm he felt it give.

He screamed. Louder than ever before, he screamed. The krutnik eagerly pulled on the arm, muscles snapping and tearing loose with every jerk.

Thomas didn’t even bother getting off his bike or braking, instead returning it to his inventory and awkwardly running away his excess momentum while he pointed his hands at the reaver. Fire gulfed from his fingers and swallowed both the reaver and part of the krutnik on Darryl’s leg.

The reaver screeched, but jumped out of the fire at Thomas’s face. Thomas tried to catch it, and they both screamed as the Fire Fingers spell clearly wasn’t meant to be used while holding something. The reaver, already injured back when Darryl threw his spear into the incoming crowd and further damaged by the fire, boiled. Meanwhile Thomas’s hands burned while he got a nasty gash from the creature in its dying throes, its tibia still stuck in his forearm as it died.

His health shot up again as he tossed the dead reaver to the side and took out the Shepherd’s Staff. It glowed and Darryl felt his muscles toughen as a pop-up notified him that his constitution got buffed. Thomas used a scroll of healing, and Darryl’s health shot back up.

The krutnik disagreed. As the flesh began to mend itself, it hugged its legs in to hang from Darryl’s arm with its full weight. The regenerating wounds tore open again. And then they tore off.

Thomas struck the leg krutnik with a magic missile while he jammed his dagger into the one hanging to Darryl’s arm. It shuddered and died, teeth still stuck and its weight still bearing him down.

Another magic missile, this one clearly weaker than the others, struck the last krutnik left but failed to kill it. Darryl made his spear pop out of his inventory, and it clattered onto the floor. Thomas picked it up and stabbed into the bug until it died.

“That- Fucking hell.” Thomas said, panting heavily.

Darryl didn’t respond, instead he fell to his knees and absentmindedly tried to pull open the jaw on his leg with his left arm. With a lot of wiggling it eventually gave, and Darryl let it bleed for a bit. The wounds were already partly healed by Thomas’s scroll, and quickly closed thanks to his passive regeneration.

Darryl lay down to regain his strength. He’d lost quite a bit of blood, and he could feel it.

Footsteps approached not long after, Darryl not even turning his head to the source as the map already told him it was Ben.

“Darryl? Are you o-” Ben’s voice trailed off as he saw Darryl. “Your arm…”

“Yeah, can’t lift it.” Darryl said. “I can stretch two of my fingers but not my elbow.”

Darryl’s arm now had an apple-core shaped indent the size of a pineapple where the krutnik bit, a ruinous crater with the imprint of the creature’s fangs still visible. The bone was still in one piece, and some muscles and tendons were still where they should be, but most of the muscle hadn’t reattached itself over the wide gap of air before growing a thin reddish layer of skin over the exposed flesh. A few muscles still poked out like electrical wires and hadn’t shifted back in place before the skin healed over it, turning the large circular gash in his arm into a jagged, frayed crevice.

“Damn it. I thought you were a goner when I saw you stood there ready for a fight, but I hadn’t expected them to have prepared something like this.” Ben said. “I mean, I guess I successfully drew those French bastards away from you, but damn…”

“Thank you.” Darryl said. Turning his head to Ben, he now saw a skull next to the teen's name. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about the things he heard back there. “Thank you.”

“Any time.” Ben said, mood a lot more dour than usual and not just because of Darryl’s arm.

You’ve been pickpocketed by Thomas J. Bennet!

Darryl didn’t know what disappeared from his inventory, but he assumed it was the fountain pen that Ben traded back to him. Ben just sat down next to him and melancholically stared down at his wounded friend.

Thomas’s constitution spell ran out, and Darryl felt the power drain from him a bit further. But his head was slowly clearing up again as the adrenaline and pain subsided.

“They will no longer play coy, now.” Darryl said, still blankly staring at the ceiling. “If not by them trying to kill me, then certainly because of...”

“Louis.” Ben answered Darryl’s lingering question.

Made sense. Nothing against Ben, but the other two seemed too skilled and tough to be done in that easily. Meanwhile Louis had been badly wounded right away, making him the most logical target to focus fire on.

You’ve been pickpocketed by Thomas J. Bennet!

Darryl accepting the trade request to return the stack of paper.

“It will make this easier, at least.” Thomas said. “Morally, and in trying to read their moves. But in combat, we’re now down half a player.”

Ben’s eyes shot fire at Thomas, but Darryl sat back up and sighed. “Yeah, no arguing there. I don’t think I’ll be able to move my right arm for anything but the lightest movements any time soon, so I can be a shield and little more.”

Darryl opened his map and widened it, studying the area they could see. He saw the woolf on the other side of the map, slowly wandering their direction. He didn’t see any blue dots, suggesting the French already retreated to another neighbourhood. There were a couple more red dots around, and several white dots of the bad llamas making their way to the boss room.

Well, neither the French nor their big bad friend seemed to be an immediate problem, so they didn’t have to go a specific direction immediately. The other two grew silent, and Darryl didn’t mind the time given to recuperate.

You’ve been pickpocketed by Thomas J. Bennet!

Ben traded him back the broken coffee machine, and it disappeared into Darryl’s junk tag again. Ben also initiated a chat option with him, once you did so you could remotely communicate with people outside of your party as well but you had to do it in person first.

They could’ve avoided a lot of trouble if they’d done that before. Or reformed the damn party before attacking the Big Bad Woolf. But those mistakes were made, no need for crying over spilled milk.

“Ben, can I have something with a lot of iron in it? I lost quite a bit of blood and I don’t think it regenerates.” Darryl said, and immediately getting a box of sizzling chicken wings from Ben. “And I don’t think we should underestimate our advantage over the French. If they keep watch over the safe room then they’re down to two active players, and if they don’t then the Germans can leave and we’ll be up to four and a half.”

“Five.” Ben corrected him. “But the father is weak, and the same probably applies to the daughter. I don’t think we can really count on their help in this.”

“Not at first, but with our help they can level faster. And even if they’re not fit for combat, they could still gather loot boxes for us to use.” Darryl rebutted.

“That’s true. And we do have exclusive access to the map that their Safe Room is in.” Thomas said. “We should try some grinding around that place, remove the mobs to avoid another surprise like this one and pounce Jean if he decides to leave without the other two present. And getting the Big Bad Woolf to wander around there might resolve our issue without causing more of… that.”

Thomas gestured at Ben’s name and the skull besides it, not wanting to acknowledge it further. Yeah, that one was going to be hard to explain to other crawlers without leaving some lingering suspicion.

You’ve been pickpocketed by Thomas J. Bennet!

Ben traded the health potion back to Darryl.

“You levelled some?” Darryl asked.

“One. It’s slightly better now, but the gloves are still most of my skill. But you seem to be under some Daze effect, increasing my odds.” Ben said.

Darryl got back to his feet, which he noted were still shaky, and began trading away his stuff. “We can walk and talk, I don’t want the woolf catching up too much.”

Ben seemed like he wanted to object, but Darryl started walking and the others followed.