“Nope, too heavy and unwieldy.” Elise said. “Not even with the bracer meant specifically for lifting more.”

She let go of the Bax and wiped the blood off her hands using a part of the felled beast’s skin not covered in it. To the side, Cuddles puked and immediately began tearing into the bull meat again. It had already done so twice, suggesting it wasn’t going to learn to eat slower from experience alone.

“Can you drag it?” Darryl asked, grabbing one of the axes and pulling with his whole body while trusting the bull’s weight to provide a counterweight. The bull’s nose was pretty tough, but still gave way eventually. Darryl fell back two steps holding the axe with a chunk of meat still hanging from it.

“Not dragging this thing all the way back to the camp.” Elise said.

“No, I meant can you drag these things to be on one pile?” Darryl said.

“If I can’t lift them, I can’t stack them. No matter what weird plan you have that would require such a thing.” Elise said.

“Thomas’s plan, actually.” Darryl said.

“Right, the brindle grub farm.” Thomas said. “A bit out of the way, but that might be smarter than the original location planned. And these guys would likely generate many grub transformations.”

The brindle grubs were the most distinct theme of this floor and were troublesome in how worthless they were. You couldn’t even set the stragglers to kill them for experience, as they yielded no experience even for lvl1 adventurers. If left alone they would grow into dangerous wasps, so completely disregarding the critters was way too dangerous.

But according to their description there was also a second form in between. Immobilised, but maybe providing the experience that the grubs themselves didn’t give. A great way to train Thomas’s Poison Cloud spell, and perhaps for the stragglers to get some kills and experience in without much risk.

“We could cut them up and store the pieces. We have the tools for that now.” Darryl said, holding up the axe that he just pulled loose.

It wasn’t a great weapon, or meant to be used by humans. It had no handle and the nose ring was in the way when trying to grab the base. Its head was one of those big double-bladed axes but the shaft was about as long as a regular fire axe, about half of what you’d want it to be.

Still, it would be better than what most people back at the camp had. Which raised the question whether they should defeat the Neighbourhood Boss as by the original plan, or allow it to keep it spawning these things and grind for axes. But that was a question for later.

Elise grabbed the bull’s horns and began pulling it to another. “About a five metre radius, right?”

“Six. Levelling increased the range too.” Thomas said.

Darryl grabbed one horn with his one good arm and Ben grabbed the other horn, but even with their combined strength and Thomas pushing they barely managed to drag the bull to the other two by the time that Elise finished dragging the last one by herself.

“Let’s not dump all our corpses onto the pile, we’ll probably want to make a few of these brindle farms.” Thomas said when they threw the boiling Slithers and a bunch of dead rats onto the bulls. “And we’ve got to gut the Krutnik rather than leave them be, I think that these grubs eat the carapace rather than hollow it out.”

“Just be sure to remember where you left your murder pile, Thomas.” Elise joked.

“I will.” Thomas responded seriously. “On the other topic, has anyone already contacted Dave about the current situation?”

The others all shook their heads and Thomas began typing. As the leader of the large group of people that still formed the lion’s share of the camp, Dave shouldered the position of organiser so he'd asked to be kept in the loop of everything relevant.

The man was no longer part of the huge party often called ‘the dregs’ by everyone else, the party that was automatically generated when a group entered the dungeon, which he left ‘to have a quieter party chat’.

Dave was, just as Darryl thought when he met the guy, a military wannabe. He not only called his group ‘Alpha’, but also insisted on alphabetically assigning names to new parties that joined. He assigned Kappa to their group and tried to exert his authority over them from time to time, though he was cautious not to overstep when he noticed that they, and especially Elise, would take offense to that.

Darryl didn’t blame the man. Every person that could fight or was willing to explore the dark tunnels was badly needed, and few of those were willing to help or coordinate beyond the occasional message. Groups Beta and Gamma simply left to do their own thing, and Epsilon was a small group of men that remained around the camp only to barter certain ‘services’ for their efforts.

Gunther had apparently joined that group, making it six bastards that tried to turn this dungeon into a red light district. But Dave had to rely even on those men to keep the dungeon inhabitants from slaughtering half the camp.

His own party only numbered nine people, taking anyone willing to defend the camp or help with escorting people. The couple that helped latecomers to level 2 was part of the group, as were three men that guarded the camp to protect their family without any intention to grind or defeat neighbourhood bosses.

Dave and the three people willing to play the ‘game’ as intended weren’t too amazing at level 6 with two neighbourhood stars either, both of which his party gained with the help of team Delta. The same team that the Frenchmen found dead in the Boil Boss room. And if it wasn’t to clear a neighbourhood for the camp to settle in, Dave likely wouldn’t have fought those two either.

Still, the man put in effort dealing with an impossible situation, so they felt at least compelled to do their own thing in accordance with his grand plan when possible. That grand plan being to send parties out in all directions in ever larger circles to scout around the camp for a Staircase instead of migrating in one general direction, and then move the dregs to that Stairway.

It worked on the first floor, and the second floor started off well. The four neighbourhoods directly adjacent to the one they camped at had been cleared, same for two of the corners. Camp defence became a lot easier after that, and that ease would only increase the more neighbourhoods around the camp were cleared.

The Boil Boss was to the camp’s direct north two neighbourhoods up rather than a directly adjacent neighbourhood, prioritised after the Boil Slithers began to swarm south. Now that they and the French planned to keep clearing the north they deviated from the plan, but not in a critical way. And considering that walking all the way back south took hours, they opted to prioritise their own convenience for now.

“Good weapons beat a boss cleared. Please do not kill it yet, we’ll see if we can use this.” Thomas summarised his conversation with Dave. “I already told him that these Baxes would not work as training mobs considering their durability and the charging being very effective against large groups. It’s up to him whether they heed our advice. And he says there have been sightings of intelligent creatures to the east, some kind of grey-skinned midgets. He asked if we could eradicate those before they can rally a warband against the camp.”

“We’ll see. If we’re not going to kill this neighbourhood boss, let’s go to the next one.” Elise said.

“Maybe we should focus on Cudd first.” Darryl said. “The Woolf ignored him, but the Neighbourhood Boss might not.”

“Good point. Cudd can’t be left unattended and I don’t think it’s a good idea if we take him along in a boss battle as he is now.” Ben said.

“Cuddles can take care of himself.” Elise said defensively. “But I agree that a boss battle might be dangerous. Maybe we can get him a nanny, there’s plenty of people that don’t have anything better to do.”

“As long as it’s not Beth and Maribelle, I don’t want them to ruin my baby.” She quickly added.

“Cuddles is level three though. We can hold him down and ignore his bites, but he might kill the nanny.” Ben said.

“We get a brawny guy for a nanny, then.” Elise tried.

“The deeper we go, the less time we’ll have to focus on Cuddles and the harder it will be to train him. The neighbourhood bosses around here aren’t going to do too much for us, getting him a head start might.” Darryl said. “I think we should focus on training him as well.”

Thomas nodded and Elise sighed. “Fine…”

­­­___ ___ ___ ___ ___

“Stay…” Elise said slowly. “Stay…”

Cuddles shivered and whined, but he stayed in place.

“Charge!” Elise shouted.

Cuddles ran forward and jumped onto the dead Bax, eating from it immediately. Elise couldn’t keep him from doing that unless she was standing directly above him able to grab him before he could make it to the cow meat, but it was a start.

“Good boy!” Elise said, waiting for a bit before she’d pick Cuddles up and drag him from the corpse. The moment that Cuddles threw up from eating too fast, a lesson he stubbornly refused to learn, Elise stepped forward and picked him up once he stopped heaving.

Cuddles struggled as she dragged him away from the Bax but stood still when she put him down. After levelling again he stopped biting at nipples and got more obedient, but was still overflowing with murderous energy.

“Stay…” Elise began again.

Darryl looked around, seeing nothing. Ben was out there somewhere, scouting their direct surroundings, but his ability to fade into shadows worked on his teammates as well.

They ran into a pair of Baxes along with a lvl4 Baxx, pretty much the exact same creature but with an axe hanging from both its nose and tail who proved even more deceptively beefy. After dragging the corpses together and throwing their collection of squished brindles on top as a morbid marinade, Elise started training again.

“Guys, we might want to move.” Ben said as he came out of the shadows.

“Enemies?” Elise said, looking up hopefully. Cudd dashed at the Bax the moment that she stopped paying attention, and she quickly grabbed his tail. He shrieked and whined and even twisted around to bite at her hand, but she bared her teeth and he rolled onto his back to show submission. Why that worked on species without teeth was beyond them, but it did.

“Worse.” Ben said. “Maribelle.”

“We need to go. We need to go. Right. Now.” Elise said only half-joking.

“They’re near?” Darryl asked.

“She. I didn’t see Beth anywhere, but Maribelle is near and slowly approaching. She must’ve heard Elise.” Ben said. “She looked distressed, but…”

“But knowing those two, that might be exactly the kind of trick they might play on our sense of responsibility to have us letting them follow and leech.” Elise said.

“Or something might’ve gone wrong. Martin should’ve taken them back to camp after finding the Safe Zone, but he’s not exactly infallible. Maybe he got wounded.” Darryl said. “I think we should ask her what happened and take her to the nearest safe zone, at least. If it’s a ploy, then we never help them again.”

“Please, it’s not a trick.” A shivering voice came from the darkness.

Maribelle appeared from the darkness and ran towards the light of Thomas’s Torch spell. Her eyes were red from tears roughly wiped away and she held a torch since extinguished like a club.

“It’s- It’s Martin. He killed Beth, and tried to kill me too. I ran, but I only had the one torch and it only lasted an hour and then there was darkness and I kept hearing these strange sounds, and then- You’ve got to help me, please, I… I…”

Maribelle shivered and then fell to her knees crying. “He killed her. He said he’d… but…”