Countdown until level collapse: 1 days 5 hours 02 minutes

The krutnik had spread to several neighbourhoods already, they knew that much. How many neighbourhoods had been the question, and the answer wasn’t pretty.

The borough they were in was a grid of 4 by 4, for a total of 16 neighbourhoods. Each seemed to be about a kilometre and a half wide, making their playing field roughly 36 square kilometres big. Of that area the krutnik had conquered, by conservative estimates, six neighbourhoods. Nine was more realistic.

The first neighbourhood they went to was the one where they fought the vulpeniers not so long ago. After leaving the Woolf neighbourhood for the Llamas and then going west, they’d walked in a circle and now came back to where they began to shake off the Woolf.

The krutnik already killed the fox boss when they arrived, and the party found a big cocoon in the boss room. They stabbed at it, and a regular reaver with limbs dissolved into ooze or swollen beyond use had fallen out.

After the initial wariness faded they had Darryl kill it, considering how harmless the acid-spitting big was as long as it didn’t face you. And it couldn’t turn fast on its one working limb. Its death by left-handed spear thrusts was awkward and took a while, but Darryl had to take the easy experience whenever it presented itself. He always got some experience for shielding the rest, but it was clear that they were gaining on him fast and would soon leave him behind.

They got a silver coward box out of it, called ‘Avoiding looming doooooom~!’, whose description ominously described them avoiding a certain chain effect. The fixed achievement description apparently didn’t account for that event to have already taken off.

They got nothing else for their kill, as the new Neighbourhood Boss hadn’t actually managed to fully form into a Neighbourhood Boss yet.

The Neighbourhood Boss room to the north was already under siege, but hadn’t fallen yet. Krutnik were coming from both the south and west, suggesting that the utmost upper-left neighbourhood had also fallen to the bug onslaught. Without the naïve optimism that there were islands of resistance behind the already fallen territory, it meant that the entire far west had fallen to them. The entire western half even, had these Rot Stickers fallen before they showed up.

The small, hairy black kamikaze balls proven rather tricky, fast and oh so eager to sacrifice three of their number so one could latch on and explode their kneecap. They knocked Darryl and Elise down every time one managed to detonate, and it was a good thing that the krutnik had thinned their numbers. It would all go downhill if there was a second wave of the things allowed to capitalise on one of them falling prone. Fortunately, though they held on, the Rot Stickers resisted extermination by the skin of their non-existent teeth.

They were too fast for the krutnik to hit unless the krutnik managed to snatch them out of the air with their fangs, and during the brief window they needed between latching on and exploding. Which meant the krutnik stopped only about one in ten of these creatures without taking the hit at best. And if the rot stickers landed on the head, they’d kill a gatherer in a single blow.

The rot stickers weren’t that smart, though, and grabbed on to whatever they could reach the easiest. And then the other rot stickers would swarm the foe until it was dead. Consequently they lost about four or five rot stickers for every gatherer blowing off its limbs first, starkly turning the numeric superiority in the invaders’ favour.

They’d already lost all territory but their boss room and the room before it when the party found it, with loose groups of rot stickers wandering about until they met krutnik invaders or crawlers. Despite Elise’s complaints about wasting time they wandered around fighting these stickers before taking on the boss, at Thomas’s insistence that they learned the fodder’s basic moves and tricks before attacking their alpha. Which wasn’t that easy without a revealed map to show the sparse survivors.

It took almost half a day, some of which they spent in a Safe Room catching their breath and waiting for Darryl’s heal and potion cooldown to end after a tense event of there still being rot stickers left to capitalise on Darryl being downed, but then they set out for the boss room.

About a dozen of the critters were waiting for them in the room before it.

“Nice, guess that purple mist is good for something after all.” Elise commented as half the rot stickers died mid-dash and just kept rolling. If it weren’t for the health bars it would’ve been hard to tell which ones died. She made a wide swing to keep the survivors back, the critters effortlessly breaking their momentum and quickly moving back to dodge. They died anyway as the poison took their last sliver of health.

“In due time it will be more worthwhile. I hope.” Thomas said, dismissing the poison fog he summoned in the hallway that had funnelled the stickers into its radius for a good three or four metres. “The spell is level two now and the damage didn’t scale as much as I hoped, but it works wonders against these fragile suicide mobs.”

Ben struck out, giving the last surviving rot sticker a close shave but not killing it. These things were already fast, so having to hit their fleshy core instead of the hair that made them look thrice as big made them even harder to kill with edged weapons.

The strike didn’t kill it, but it wasn’t clean enough to neatly cut through all the hair either. The rot sticker squeaked as strands got tangled and dragged it along the swipe. It made a crunching noise when it hit the wall, and stopped moving.

“I still think that your Steamy Fingers would work better here.” Elise said.

“Less range, smaller area of effect and just a few seconds render the mana expense greater.” Thomas said, ignoring her intentional mispronunciation of the spell. “Not to mention, it’s probably a bad idea to use fire on things that explode.”

“Or the best idea, they might take each other out in a chain reaction.” Ben said.

“Famous last words.” Darryl said, to which Ben chuckled.

“Enough banter, mamma wants some bronze stars.” Elise said. She walked ahead, grabbed the door handle, froze and made a show of turning around slowly. “Everyone ready for some impeccable teamwork? I dare not dream of being a dumb brute rushing ahead again.”

Thomas nodded without showing the agitation she was fishing for, and she played it off with a wink and a cheeky smile as she walked through the door.

She didn’t just saunter in and pose for battle, but drew her bat and ran at the nearest rot sticker. A magic missile followed suit to take out one on the far end of the room, and Darryl kicked one near the entrance. It died on impact, its corpse flying through a rocky landscape covered with patches of a brown grass-like plant that would no doubt serve as great camouflage for these damned things.

Two more stickers stirred and were dispatched before the music blared through non-existent speakers, and something large and grey moved in the centre of the room. A long snake neck reared up a head that was surprisingly round and soft for a body that looked to be covered in a coat of granite pebbles. Two ears perked up and turned and twisted around for sound, while cat-like eyes blinked drowsily.

A face that was best described as a mix between a cat and an owl without either’s mouth turned to them, and then split into a large double-slit snake mouth without teeth or tongue. As it yawned, it showed them nothing but a deep dark hole of flesh surrounded by four face-halves. The upper two twisted unnaturally so that the cat-eyes squinted at them at all times.

“Elise!” Thomas shouted. “Don’t-”

The world froze.

Boss battle!

You have discovered the lair of a Neighbourhood Boss! Put your game faces on ladies and gentlemen! Aaaand Here. We. Go!

Felake! Felake! It’s a Rot Felake!

Level 7 Neighbourhood boss!

Once upon a time Rot Stickers were an independent species, going around blowing themselves up so the colony could feed! A heart-warming sacrifice for the family, I’m sure. Obviously, evolution remorselessly rendered these primal rot stickers extinct after a natural disaster made for slim pickings! A handful of the little buggers survived by changing into a parasitic life form that incapacitated their prey, cauterised its wounds and then forced it to cling on to life as they fed on its dying remains for months! They too disappeared after pushing their preferred prey into extinction!

These Rot Stickers are a cousin that found a working alternative by happenstance, in the form of the patient Felake predators who didn’t need blowing up before making a good host! The creature just opened its mouth, the rot stickers went in and they started their parasitic lifecycle. Now, after centuries of further evolution, they merged into a symbiotic couple. The Felake lost all its predatory means in exchange for a thick stony shell that slows it down to a literal snail pace, while the Rot Stickers can’t digest anything but the Felake’s inner juices! The former coughs up the latter, they kill something near their host and the Felake slowly crawls to claim their meal!

You’re not facing this slow modern version, because that would be hella-boring! Instead we recreated one of those early models where the Felake can still move around with speed and ferocity befitting an ambush predator! And unless it looks drowsy from the strain of its parasitic inhabitants copulating like crazy, I bet it’s two milliseconds away from gobbling you up whole before we froze time.

“do it!” Thomas finished.

“Doing it!” Elise cheerfully replied.

Time resumed, and the lit torch flew in a lazy arc to the yawning felake’s mouth. It yelped in surprise and pain when it swallowed, and then something exploded inside of it. It immediately lost a quarter of its health as it shuddered and convulsed.

The felake turned to Elise and belched, breathing fire and sulphur at her like some weird dragon. She screamed and tried to block it with her bat, which helped little.

Thomas R. Haanen has left the party!

Darryl cast heal on himself, removing most of the damage that the tiara sent his way. A green glow suggested that Ben and Thomas did the same, though the same amount of damage did more of a number on their shallower health pool. Had they been in a party of three with Elise, both would’ve died just now.

Thomas drank a health potion to bump his health from a third closer to full, while Ben looked torn. He took a second before making the call.

Elise Bergher has been kicked from the party by Thomas J. Bennet!

The Felake gagged, convulsed again and then threw up a bunch of hairballs. That were on fire, and already very dead.

Elise threw an angry look at Ben, but didn’t say anything as she raised her bat and charged at the stone snake thing. Though not as indestructible as its alleged modern version, the creature was still very hardy and the bat bounced off its pebble-like hide barely dealing damage. Ben stabbed it, and his knives didn’t pierce through to deal any damage at all.

The felake ignored them as it brought its head down, squeezed itself together into a spring-like shape and lunged forward. In the span of a few heartbeats. Darryl already had his shield up, but the reason he blocked the attack was because the previously slow felake had been so lightning fast that he couldn’t even flinch and break his stance to jump out of the way.

The shield took the brunt of the force, and with his high shielding skills the large beast didn’t break through. Darryl still saw his health take a hit through the shield for the first time since he got his Paladin Plate Protector, and his stance was broken as the creature rammed his shield so hard that he was thrown back prone.

The felake reared its head up again, and regurgitated more hairballs. The Rot Stickers were still alive this time, and quickly moved to blow him up. Darryl managed to kick one, his Spartan Sandals sending it flying further than his hasty kick warranted, and two latched on to his shield as he quickly placed it between himself and the critters. He felt the explosions reverberate through, and his health took two small dips.

The last Rot Sticker got through and latched on to Darryl’s thigh. He let out a hoarse scream as it blew up, and quickly popped a health potion.

The felake didn’t bother him any further, instead turning to Thomas and coiling up again. Elise smashed it as it flew past her, throwing it slightly off course. Combined with Thomas already being on the move after having seen it do that once before, the large snake rammed itself into the wall instead. Its health shook heavily and the word Dazed appeared above its head.

Seconds later Ben reached it and began stabbing, dealing more damage now that the Dazed target not looking at him apparently sufficed to add certain multipliers.

The status effect disappeared after three stabs, the felake shook its head, and Elise made a running jump to smash her bat into its face. Instead of engaging the creature rolled sideways away from her, and began regurgitating again. Elise smashed at it again, but it didn’t stop.

Another torch appeared in her hand, and as the felake opened its mouth she shoved it in. This time it didn’t result in suppressed explosions coming from deep inside its gullet, but rather the rot stickers flying into the torch and promptly exploding.

Both the felake and Elise screamed in pain as its throat and her torch-holding hand were licked by the flames, and her health took a sizeable dip. She swung her bat at it one-handed, and it bounced off its scales dealing barely a third of the damage it did before.

She struck again and again, and Ben showed up to start stabbing into it again. The sliver of health the felake had left quickly dropped until it finally died.

Winner!

Their mugshots appeared next to the now greyed out felake, and Darryl saw that he and Ben were the only two still registered as their party while both Thomas and Elise were separate portraits under “Assist”.

The two of them had gotten the kill thanks to their combined damage beating out Elise, while Elise and Thomas both got the experience and a bronze star. Surprisingly enough Thomas wasn’t that far behind Elise in damage despite having dealt no damage to the felake, and beat out Darryl and Ben individually.

As Darryl turned to Elise, he could tell from her stormy expression that she was pissed. And she turned to an equally agitated Thomas.