When it rains, it pours.

Things had been quiet before. Not a tense silence that unnerved you or made you itch for a problem to pop up, the well-known ‘silence before the storm’, but a productive quiet where you could focus on the small problems and chores.

Darryl and Thomas dropped Elise off at the Eastern front and continued on to the Northern front. There they took a gander at the brindle pupa threat, which turned out to be lvl3 cocoons with long, barbed tails that they used to swipe at people.

Thomas deduced that the creatures needed disturbingly little food to transform and become ticking wasp-bombs. One grub would have to eat about five times their negligible weight, by his first estimate.

When trying to express a dead muscle-bound bull in terms of thumb-sized maggots, you apparently ended up with about 10.000 grubs/bull according to Thomas, or 2000 brindle pupa transformations.

They didn’t find quite that many pupae waiting for them, because the pupae that ate the skin cocooned right where they finished eating and blocked their hungry friends. So there were ‘just’ a few hundred ticking vespa bombs.

As the brindle grubs were squirming and pushing to get to the food, it still meant that there wasn’t a single inch of the bull exposed. Some pupae had even been dislodged by their fellows and rolled away. There were tentacles popping out of thin gaps and cracks between the cocoons that seemed too tight for even a single grub to squeeze through, suggesting that these brindle grubs either burrowed or stacked on top of one another if at all possible.

The result was the stuff of nightmares, the bull corpses transformed into a mass of green-veined white sacs that each spawned a wriggling tentacle when Darryl came close. There were three of the mounds here, still crawling with literally thousands of brindle grubs desperately searching for non-existent gaps.

Thomas cast Poison Fog, and after a good 20-30 seconds Darryl’s chat notifications were completely replaced with a looooooong list of identical notifications of gaining a miniscule amount of experience.

The grubs still earned them nothing, but the pupae gave about 5xp each. Darryl got 0.025 just for standing there watching the onslaught, while Elise and Ben got 0.01 for being in the same party.The remaining 4.965xp was pretty negligible, Darryl remembered a single krutnik gatherer to reward about 200 and spare experience, but the sheer quantity was still daunting.

Thomas didn’t seem too fazed, he probably already assumed something like this would happen if it worked. He instead commented that his Poisonous Fog spell levelled twice and that they would have to come back later to see if the grubs would also eat their own, ignoring that he jumped up to level 10 just by casting this spell.

Darryl stabbed the last few pupae that rolled out of the fog’s reach, and found that they were child’s play to kill for someone with reach. The pupae acted as stationary beings even when not stuck to a corpse, and their disproportionally long tail was still just about an arm’s length. It moved slowly as it coiled up its attack, and its attacks were inaccurate considering the swing made the cocoon flop and fly around in a way that the pupa’s low intelligence couldn’t account for.

So for someone with a spear like him, killing them was just clean-up duty. Even an unexperienced newbie facing a wriggling sea of these tentacles on a dead bull shouldn’t have a problem, as long as the pupae wouldn’t coil around the shaft and drag it out of your hands. And that seemed unlikely as their tail was purely for fending off foes, not for grappling.

With that over and done with, they moved on to the Lambdas waiting for them.

The lambs, as those with levels started to call the new team trying to claw themselves into the game, numbered fourteen and Darryl could optimistically say that at least half seemed at least properly motivated. More and more people seemed to realise that others wouldn’t keep taking care of them, or saw the Safe Room condemnation as a wake-up call.

Darryl distributed the collection of Bax Axes that they already had, favouring those motivated few over the rest unless they already had a decent weapon, and introduced himself to the group.

Seems like the camp couldn’t spare more than one other instructor, Belinda from team Alpha. Unfortunately, the fluffy fifty-something woman at lvl5 didn’t look like much of a fighter. His suspicions were confirmed when she said she was more a support healer, meaning that they were going to do this without a reliable DPS. Lovely.

While he tried to organise the group, Thomas opened his achievement boxes, and the… Even Darryl went quiet and watched in amazement when Thomas started opening boxes and the colour went from bronze to silver to gold to platinum to a kind of box that they hadn’t seen before.

“What… The hell, Thomas? Was that a legendary?” Darryl said.

“Silver for killing three mobs with one spell, gold for twenty, the platinum for a hundred and a Legendary Blast-mage Box for a thousand kills with one spell.” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “A Gold Grinder Box for having my total mob kills go over a thousand, upgraded to a Platinum Trailblazing Grinder Box for being one of the first hundred people to do so and doing it before the third floor. And a few of the usual petty name-calling bronze boxes. A Bronze Pest Control Box, and a Silver Bully Box for killing so many mobs more than 5 levels below me.”

“Shame, I should’ve visited the other farms before opening my boxes.” He continued after sighing regretfully, showing a small tattoo on the back of his right index finger. “That last box gave me an auto-equipped status effect that slightly increases experience I get from mobs at a higher level than mine, at the expense of lowering the experience gained from weaker mobs. I think the AI just reduced my experience gain for killing pupae to being negligible, if not entirely zero. Well, guess that means more for your group.”

“And the rest of your stuff?” Darryl asked.

“Spells, mostly.” Thomas said. “Aoe and heavy firepower stuff one and all, and these little things from my gold box. Some intelligence, a little bit of dex, and cold resistance for some reason.”

Thomas held up nothing but thin air, and from his inventory a pair of fluffy slippers appeared. They were old man slippers, but salmon pink with a smiling panda on them. Thomas ignored the design as he took off his normal surface shoes and put them on.

“Might be a bit inconvenient when running, but they seem to fit tightly enough for walking.” Thomas shrugged. “I think that the AI gave me the bottom of the barrel stuff and inconvenient spells though, considering I didn’t really earn these achievements the way they intended. The spells are pretty nice, but my legendary box spell ‘Firestorm’ needs more than ten times the mana I have right now, even after putting on this hat I can’t cast it.”

Thomas took out a pointy wide-brimmed wizard hat and put it on. “This platinum grinding item is pretty damn amazing, too. The hat of the Wizard Progeny pretty much triples my mana reserves, as it grants +10 Int, +20 Mana and +20% mana that stacks with the previous two mana boosts. And I just got an achievement for reaching the top 10 crawlers with the highest mana pool just for putting it on. No reward, though.”

“Ha! You know what they say. When it rains, it pours.” Darryl laughed. “Guess that now that you’re ahead of the curve, I bet you’re going to get a lot more of th-”

Ben: GUYS!!! MARTIN IS HERE!!! AND HE HAS EPSILON!

Thomas: As in?

Ben: THEY TEAMED UP!

Ben: TWELVE CRAWLERS, HEADED FOR THE WEST SAFE ZONE!!!

Darryl: Maybe Epsilon caught him?

Elise: Dude, those guys? Nah, they sound like they’d jump at the chance of platinum boxes for an easy job.

Elise: Oh, also, the fairies are coming. About 80 of them. Carter guesses that we’ve got maybe an hour before they hit the first Safe Zone, and the camp in two.

Thomas: Just took a glance at the camp chat updates from Dave, it seems a conflict has just escalated. Some parents insisted on coming with their kids, then other adults wanted to join the escort to the Safe Zone and words turned into fists flying.

Thomas: Seems like some people are making a run for the Safe Zone themselves. The convoy with kids hasn’t left the camp yet, and Dave fears that there won’t be enough place for all the kids if the runners make it there.

Elise: Why are we helping these people again?

Darryl: But at least it’s just those three problems, right?

Ben: WAIT!? WHAT ABOUT CUDDLES?! I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT HIM, DID WE LOSE HIM!?!

Elise: What are you talking about? He’s been with me all along. I’ve got him under my arm as I’m running away, bastard’s getting heavy.

Ben: o good, only three problems. three huge ass probelsm

Thomas: Alright, that’s pretty bad. Elise and Ben, you’re already falling back to the camp so just continue doing that. I told Dave to just evacuate the whole camp to the north, hopefully he can make do with what he has. Once I’ve dealt with my other corpse farms I’ll head down to join you.

Elise: We’ve got bigger issues than your corpse farms, dude. Come down to help us!

Thomas: Actually, the corpse farms might be our biggest issue if not addressed right away. Checking the map, I’m seeing several fast-moving red dots in previously cleared areas.

Thomas: Even if those vespas are from the very first corpses made on this floor, that still means that the transformation takes only 2.5 to 3 days. Which is 1-2 days quicker than my expectations, and introduces the issue of exponential growth at the last day if these vespas attack other mobs.

Darryl: And there were about 400 pupae on each dead Bax, which we left there yesterday-ish. Tomorrow, eight of those pupae mounds are going to pop open and release a swarm.

Elise: Well fuck.

Elise: Take your time, be thorough.

Ben: ^

Elise: Oh, and issue five isn’t a big one. For some reason one of my teammates Martin, no relation to the other one, decided to drink from this low-grade booze that the Clurichauns are carrying. The description says that the stuff can buff one random stat by two points and gives you the Shitfaced debuff, and after taking a swig the moron is now blind for 30 hours. The noob didn’t think that the AI likes to screw with people.

Darryl: Issue six, anyone? When it rains it pours, so let’s just have it pour down all at once.

Thomas: Took a look at the jar you just sent. Guy’s lucky, the fairy booze has a 5% chance to outright kill you instantly. I put the warning in the main chat too.

“Alright, I’ll go clear out my other corpse farms, and I’ll torch them down while I’m at it.” Thomas said, taking out his bicycle.

“Change of plans, everyone!” Thomas then said loudly, addressing the group. “As some of you may have seen in the chat, a couple of issues have popped up so we’ll have to delay today’s lessons. Darryl and Belinda here are in charge, please help them the best you can!”

With that, he walked out of the Safe Zone and took off. Darryl smiled awkwardly and turned to the group of people, half of which were looking at him expectantly while the other half had glazed-over eyes checking out their chats.

“Alright, so… You’ve heard Thomas, I’m afraid that going into Bax territory has gotten a bit more dangerous while there’s more pressing matters, so we won’t be doing that now.” Darryl said. “Instead, we’re going to do a bit of clean-up.”