Time until level collapse: 1 day 18 hours 02 minutes.

“Oh yeah, it was crazy!” Ben said. “There were a bunch of them, and from the way some were dressed I’m pretty sure the Mayor was abducting hookers as well. He locked up to two or three of those mobs in every room, making the place a continuous cycle of explore, fight, investigate, repeat.”

“The Haunted mobs killed most of them before we even entered, though. The story was about wailing and cursed frostmaiden experiments, and that we had to make a choice to try and cure them or to put them out of their misery. The Haunted mobs reduced them to the same insane murder mobs as usual.” Tatiana said. “The whole storyline was derailed about two days ago, things happening without crawlers triggering events. I could kind of see the intended storyline, but it was simply broken at this point.”

“The Mayor was a Neighbourhood Boss, so he killed several of those Haunted mobs himself.” Ben said, his enthusiasm as he told last night's story undaunted. “He wanted to work with us to contain his experiments, and tried to convince us that they were supposed to be peaceful and blessed with eternal youth rather than cursed by his hand. But he was already wounded and haggard, and really it was just a matter of time until one of those spectres had a high enough level to Possess him. So I killed him. And that’s why you’re looking at the new Mayor of West Creek.”

Ben puffed his chest out, and Alexa pouted.

“Damn it, that sounds so cool! Why didn’t you guys bring me along!?” She complained.

“You were tired.” I said.

“Not that tired!” Alexa protested.

“Yes, you were.” I replied.

“You were already Very Exhausted. That’s a 40% penalty on all stats but Strength.” Livia said. “And Hoarse on top of that, decreasing the effectiveness of all voice-based skills by 50%. It’s a good thing you didn’t go fight mobs at night with such a handicap.”

Alexa grumbled and dug into the, for her, massive sandwich in silent protest.

“So that’s where all the spectres went? Into the Mayor’s Mansion?” Miho asked.

“Nah. There were about a dozen in there at best. We killed the same spectre several times, it kept jumping from body to body and gave them a Tentacle Tongue attack to reel Tatiana in. Really annoying.” Ben said. “But it was the highest-level spectre around, so we kept it to increase the experience we got for the mobs it possessed. Didn’t yield any ectoplasm in the end.”

“So we still don’t know where most spectres went?” I asked. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll focus on gathering the last corpses in the outskirts for Elise, Miho said she’ll come with me to prevent me from freezing up, and Alexa just needs to pace herself instead of singing for hours on end. You two were planning on scouting further out to see if you can find those spectres and/or larger groups of mobs, right?”

“Well, maybe I need to do some Mayor stuff now that I’m the Mayor, but I honestly wouldn’t know what that will be like.” Ben said. “Carrie is my only employee, and she’s not really…”

“Indeed.” Tatiana said, bristling a little when Carrie was brought up. “I hope this title won’t be more trouble than it is worth. There’s not a lot of things you can do with it, it seems.”

“Oh right.” Ben said, taking out a quill and several strips of paper. He wrote down a vague message of consent and handed one to each of us. The piece of paper he handed me had turned into a genuine Gate Pass with my name on it.

“Right, that will come in handy.” I said.

“One of the few boons you’ll get out of being a Mayor, with just two days left to this floor.” Livia said. “Most things like tithes aren’t going to be worth it, and you don’t get many executive powers like commanding the guards on this floor. That’s a 6th floor thing.”

“It was an easy kill, worth it for the Neighbourhood Map alone.” Ben shrugged. “By the way…”

Ben turned to the empty table behind him and took out a human corpse. The waitress shrieked and the birdfolk bartender looked alarmed, but I knew the guards weren’t going to bother us over something like this now that we had Gate Passes.

I walked over to the corpse of a pudgy man in his fifties still in a black suit with bowtie and suspenders, and looted his Neighbourhood Map. The entire town centre was revealed to me, all the way to the edges where people still lived. Our tannery fell beyond that range, and there were a lot of buildings whose interiors remained obscured to us. Miho and Alexa followed my lead, and I pocketed the Mayor again before the innkeeper would make a fuss over this. The waitress was already coming over with a rag and some powerful cleaning agents.

“Right. I’ll be going then. Alexa, good luck. Tatiana, try to keep Ben out of trouble.” I said.

Tatiana saluted while Ben took the jab like a bro, and Livia nodded. “Don’t worry. Now that she’s not leaving the town premises, I can stay with Alexa to help with her performances directly.”

Alexa mouthed ‘Help me!’, but I ignored her silent pleas and headed out.

___ ___ ___ ___

Gathering corpses had gotten a lot harder. There were still a few Haunted mobs around, but they were clearly more interested in NPCs than Street Urchins at this point. On my way out of town I passed a few scenes of broken windows and panicking NPCs whose family members had gone missing in the night. Most houses were sturdy with latched doors and boarded windows, but those barriers didn’t dissuade Haunted mobs the way they did the regular night mobs. Or stop a spectre from inhabiting whomever was inside the boarded-up house.

For me, this meant that the Street Urchins cleaned up almost all of the corpses. There were a few buried underneath the rubble or on an elevation the spikeballs couldn’t reach, and there was the occasional pile of corpses that the urchins simply hadn’t finished yet. But it was far from the easy and fat hauls that I brought in yesterday. And there were few living creatures left to turn into corpses, too.

Once again I lamented that we never had the chance to loot the Neighbourhood Maps from the Bosses we fought in the tower. It would’ve been a lot easier to find the leftover corpses if I had a fully revealed map.

I pulled up a support beam, and a small landslide of debris fell down. Miho shoved the largest pieces of rubble aside and looked at our findings.

“A dead bugaboo bear. Too humanoid to skin for hide without moral consequences.” Miho said.

I uttered a mild curse and let go of the support beam once she backed away, which immediately buried the corpse again.

Miho turned into a harpy and flew up again to see if she could find another corpse up high. She kept circling around my position, but there was still quite some distance between us. It wasn't as if there was much danger left around here.

I looked down as I heard something round and metallic drop in front of my feet, and as I studied the metal ball it began to spray out a green gas. Within moments, I was surrounded by the heavily obscuring green mist.

I took out my Guard Spear and shield and tried to listen for anyone trying to attack me. I heard shuffling around me, but nothing came close. Then I got hit by a few darts, piercing my skin only for the liquid inside of them to find no veins to pour into.

About ten seconds later the mist dispersed, and I found myself surrounded by grimy-looking men and women.

Johnny ‘Weak-Knees’ Johnson - Level 7 Bounty Hunter

Thugrok ‘Thug-Life’ Nailbeard - Level 9 Bounty Hunter

Bonnie ‘The Clyde’ Faire - Level 8 Bounty Hunter

Fanny ‘the Manny’ Coriander - Level 9 Bounty Hunter

Burl - Level 15 Professional Bounty Hunter

“So, you’re a quick thinker, ey? Managed to hold your breath before you breathed in Johnny’s knock-out gas?” Johnny the lanky thirty-year-old human said with a thick Hollywood Mafioso accent. “Clever, I have to hand it to ya. But also foolish, because taking a little nap would’ve made things easier for all of us. Now Johnny has to knock ya out the painful way.”

“Nah, I like it! There’s no fun in an easy bagging like that!” Fanny cheered in a pitched cutesy voice that didn’t fit her muscular heavy-set physique. “He somehow managed to dodge my vertigo stings too! And Bonnie’s Heavy Headache Perfume. I hope he’ll resist even more tricks! Those are always fun!”

“Not to interrupt the bandit introduction routine, but what do you guys want?” I asked when Bonnie was about to speak up.

Darryl: Miho, keep your distance for now.

Miho: Got it.

“Who’s the master burglar?” Burl asked with a voice that sounded like he swallowed marbles.

“The what?” I asked.

“Dunnya play dumb wi’ us, boi.” The heavily tattooed dwarf named Thugrok asked with the heavy Scottish accent I expecting, just worse. “Preh’y much ef’ry shop ‘n half the ar’sns o Wes Creek haff b’n clearn ou o all ‘em stock.”

“Yeah, tons of stuff just disappearing in the middle of the day! I wonder how they did it, and if they can teach me.” The well-endowed half-orc Bonnie said, licking her full lips.

“Eh? Johnny is many things, but a thief ain’t one of them, see?” Johnny glared at her.

“Can we roll back to the explanation as to why we’re here?” I asked. “I couldn’t understand half of what the dwarf said.”

“Ye go’ cot’n in yer ears, boi?” Thugrok growled angrily.

“Give it a rest, little big guy.” Fanny said. “I can rarely understand you neither.”

“The master burglar. Speak.” Burl growled.

“Not a clue.” I lied.

“See, we want to believe ya’ll. Well, not really, but you know?” Bonnie said. “But we have been speaking with this grumpy Foreman dude, and he told us about what happened yesterday.”

“You discuss merger, talks go south. Minutes later, burglar steals all his stuff.” Burl growled. “Except the things that you want out of the deal.”

“Awfully suspicious if you ask me.” Bonnie purred, clearly more pleased to finally have a lead than caring about the specifics.

“A burglar has been hitting every shop in town with coin and valuable goods, and you find it suspicious that my competitor got robbed?” I asked. “Did you harass the last pawnshop to get hit too before they got robbed?”

“Ya set up shop when the robberies started, got ya hands on a certificate lost for years and nobody knows where you’re getting the coin to produce for the prices you’re offering. And here ya stand, suspiciously well-armed for a simple tanner.” Johnny said. “Awfully fishy if ya ask me, see?”

“The Master Burglar.” Burl growled again. “Who? Where? How?”

I sighed. “There’s a box in the Mayor’s Office where he puts all the permits and other documents that people can come pick up. The certificate to the tannery has been in there for years, I just found it by happenstance when looking through all of those papers.”

“Please, as if something like that wouldn’t be noticed.” Fanny said. “People having been looking for that piece of paper for years, someone working at the Mayor’s Office would’ve noticed it by now.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Gov’mnt burr’crisy.” Thugrok sighed.

“I don’t know if Cindy still works there, but if she does I can assure ya’ll she wouldn’t have noticed that piece of paper in a million years.” Bonnie said.

“What about the theft?” Johnny said.

“The thief stole everything in that tannery but the stack of corpses.” Fanny sighed. “Which are heavy, decay and don’t sell for a lot.”

“They stole the meat disposal bin.” Johnny countered. “With the meat waste still in it.”

Fanny just shrugged.

“Talking about decaying corpses, the ones on my cart aren’t becoming any fresher.” I said. “I still have to find a few more before I can go back. So if you don’t mind…”

“Damn waste of a knock-out shell.” Johnny sighed.

“We be wah’sjn ye, boi.” Thugrok ominously whispered to me.

The bounty hunters drooped off, and I quickly PM’d the others what just happened. Those people were clearly built to ambush, and hit me with three different debuffs right out of the gate. I resisted everything because all three attacks were poison-based and I had complete immunity to those. But if they managed to get the drop on Ben, he wouldn’t be so lucky.

Then I grabbed the cart and went in the opposite direction of the scripted encounter that I fortunately managed to diffuse. Now we just had to-

I heard a hoarse scream behind me, and I quickly turned around to see a centipede bite into Fanny’s face. The woman’s cutesy voice was nowhere to be heard as she tried to pull the creature off, but the paralysing agent was already doing its job.

The others weren’t faring any better. Johnny missed his throw and the grenade harmlessly fumed a few metres behind the Great Burrower Cultist, who was pelting him and Bonny with bolts of fire and electricity. An NPC commoner was trying to stab a large kitchen knife into Thugrok’s face, the two men pitched in a struggle of whether the man could kill the dwarf before the dwarf could free his axe from its sheath with one hand and no space to manoeuvre.

Only Burl was doing well, dodging and weaving around the fire-breathing Tannaruk’s grapples and reckless punches. But there were three more Haunted mobs that hadn’t even joined the fight yet, so his luck would end soon.

I sighed, but put down the cart and took out my skyfowl javelin. It split in four as I threw it, and two of the spears found their way into the spellcasting cultist while Bonny yelped in surprise as the third one missed her by a hair.

I threw the spear again, this time at the three mobs that had yet to join the fray. I took out my new Guard Spear and ran towards Johnny. I wasn’t fast enough, and he didn’t see the spectre fly out of the cultist’s body into Bonny. She kicked him in the knee with her stiletto-heels that had actual stilettos build into them, and then rammed a slender knife into his throat.

The centipede detached from Fanny’s dead body and teleported to bite my face next. The stinger plinked against my cheek, and I backhanded the centipede onto the ground before it could latch on. I got a notification that my bingo ticket got stamped with another part of the body hit. I already had a few stamps, but no prize. I ignored it for now as I squashed the bug’s head with my foot.

Ignoring Bonny, it was probably a bad idea to kill their companions before the bounty hunters realized that they were possessed, I ran towards Thugrok. I pulled the villager off him with relative ease, and slashed him in half with a wide slash of my ‘spear’. Thugrok repaid me by drawing his axe and teleporting to be just above me.

Right, spectres. I should use Elise’s bat here.

I jumped to the side as I quickly pocketed my big unwieldy spear. Thugrok’s axe still found my shoulder and left a deep dent. I silently muttered a curse as I had to scroll through my weapon tab for Elise’s bat, which wasn’t on my hotbar. Thugrok gave chase as I walked backwards, but I already had my shield out to deflect his blows.

I activated my gloves and my Skyfowl Spear appeared in my hand. I stabbed Thugrok in the gut and left my spear in there for now. I tried to kick him, but he teleported behind me. I felt a jolt of pain in my back, but pivoted around and hit him in the face with my shield.

Bonny flanked me before I could take down Thugrok, but Miho fell upon her and began to envelop and scratch her head at the same time. I quickly tore my gaze from that dreadful sight, but what little I saw was still enough to be grateful that we never saw the gliding squirrels successfully pull off one of their attacks on us.

I finally found Elise’s bat in my inventory and pocketed my shield to wield it with both hands. The bat wasn’t made for one-handed attacks and lacked the damage I needed, and I quickly beat Thugrok to death before Bonny could recover. By the time I was done with the dwarf, I just needed to deal the final blow to Miho's target.

I turned to the rest of the battle, only to find it over. Burl chose running over facing the remaining three Haunted mobs directly, and they had all gone into pursuit instead of attacking us. I caught his figure disappearing around a corner, the mobs hot on his tail.

I popped a health potion to recover the quarter of health I lost. I wasn’t sure how much the haunted mob’s levels increased things, but I realised that I would’ve died had these five bounty hunters attacked me as an organised unit under normal circumstances. Poison immunity or not.

I looted their corpses, finding a few interesting weapons and items but nothing really breath-taking. The haunted mobs weren’t carrying much either, though that was to be expected.

As I crouched down to loot one of the cultists, I suddenly realised something.

These cultists worshipped the Krutnik.

The Krutnik, which were a numerous hive situated almost directly underneath West Creek Town.

And most spectres had disappeared to an unknown nearby location.

“Ah, fuck.”