The explosion stripped away the ground from above us, vaporized my metallic armor, and seared much of my actual flesh to charcoal. It excoriated me down to a fragment of myself with no awareness aside from pain.

An instant later, Carl's potion washed away the pain and I was back, burns gone and mind clear. My metal was still missing.

New Achievement: The Hole Truth!

You escaped disaster by burying yourself and your friends alive like a bunch of bitty little bugs. You coward!

Reward: A Bronze Dirtdiver Box!

New Achievement: Metal Meatshield!

Your friends are alive because you were there to stand in front of them. Hey, look! There is a way for you to contribute!

Reward: A Silver Meatshield Box!

New Achievement: Ground Three Survivor

You have survived a Cataclysm-level explosion. You weren't standing at ground zero like a boss, and you weren't walking slowly away without looking back like a badass, but you were pretty damn close to the blast. Call it 'ground three' instead of ground zero.

Reward: A Silver Duck and Cover Box!

New Achievement: That Was Metal, Past Tense

Congratulations on having over a ton of metal vaporized out of you all in one go. How's it feel to be useless again?

Reward: A Silver Chelation Box!

New Achievement! Monster Mauled!

You contributed to an attack that took a City Boss from full to red in one go! Just think how much more awesome this would have been if you had done it on your own.

Reward: A Silver Masher Box!

New Achievement! Sapper's Sous-chef!

You have contributed to the creation of a Cataclysm-level explosion!

Reward: A Silver Boombabe Box!

New Achievement! Hellish Sapper ('s Assistant)!

You have contributed to the creation of a Cataclysm-level explosion infused with the power of the Infernal!

Reward: A Silver Hellfire Box!

New Achievement! Zapper Sapper ('s Assistant)!

You have contributed to the creation of a Cataclysm-level explosion that included electrical megadamage!

Reward: A Silver Zappy Box!

New Achievement: Going Down...and Up!

You went from 100% health to 1% health to 100% health in under a second. Damn, good thing you've got friends carrying you!

Reward: Your Silver Meatshield Box is upgraded to Gold!

New Achievement! Hassle-free Hellfire!

Somehow you have survived being in the blast radius of a Cataclysm-level explosion infused with the power of the Infernal! Seriously, what the Hell? (See what I did there?)

Reward: A Gold Sanctity Box!

New Achievement! Thunderstruck!

Somehow you have survived being in the blast radius of a Cataclysm-level explosion that included electrical megadamage!

Reward: A Gold Bugzapper Box!

New Achievement: Ultimate Teabag Frag!

Some people like to rub their junk on their defeated enemies. You apparently go next level with that shit, because you used your entire naked body and you did it to your friends! It was hilarious and I would have given you a great prize if you hadn't chickened out and had blankets in the way.

Reward: That sense of sad awkwardness you'll feel whenever you look at them from now on. (Oh, wait...watching that is my reward.)

I had collapsed into an amorphous puddle after most of my mass was vaporized; I shifted back into human form and dragged myself out of the hole, rolling to the side in exhaustion with an arm over my eyes. Carl pulled himself up behind me, Donut on his shoulder.

"You are fucking kidding me," he said in disbelief.

"Huh?" I took the arm away and looked over to him.

"The music hasn't stopped. Look there."

I followed his pointing finger to the Train Baby's remains.

When the fight started, the Train Baby had been thirty meters tall with pudgy limbs, a giant head, and a dozen tendrils trailing from its mouth. The Baby had worn a cloth diaper that must have been big enough to cover an Olympic swimming pool, and the way it sagged had suggested that the diaper was fully loaded.

The Train Baby no longer looked like that.

Take a sphere and overlap it with a giant baby sitting crosslegged, then remove everything the sphere touches. The legs from the knees down and part of the thighs. The front of the belly and everything from the middle of the back up. The right arm was gone, the left was severed at the clavicle. The front of the pelvis was gone, leaving three-quarters of a diaper wrapped around some charred hips and lower back. A mudslide of feces had spilled out.

From what I could reconstruct, the Baby had been sitting cross-legged when the explosively-primed Nightmare Express went past. The Baby snatched up the train and pounded it on the ground as Brandy told us it would, as we had counted on it to do. In the process it cracked open one of the dwarven batteries we'd taped to the engine. That explosion chain-fired with the overloaded boiler and the pile of Sheol bricks in the engineer's compartment to produce an explosion so powerful it had scooped out a crater eight meters deep and so large that we were still inside it despite being eighty meters away. The Baby, of course, had been at ground zero of that blast.

The amount of damage was ridiculous, and what was more ridiculous was that the Baby wasn't dead. Its enormous health bar was deep in the red, but as I watched it ticked very slightly upwards. The severed left arm was twitching, the fingers convulsing spastically and slowly dragging itself back towards the body. A tendril was crawling upwards from the blackened top of the spine, which now ended at the lower back.

"That is so unfair," Donut said calmly.

No sooner had the words left her mouth then the spine tendril whipped towards us with a loud Reeeeee!

"Goddamnit, Donut. You had to get its attention, didn't you?"

"Really, Carl. How was I supposed to know that it could hear me from eighty meters?"

"I don't have any metal left!" I whimpered. "What do I do?!"

"Damnit," Carl muttered. "I should have made a second backpack."

You have received a Platinum Benefactor Box from Princess Formidable of the Skull Empire! Too bad you won't live long enough to open it.

"Ooh!" Donut shrieked, hopping up and down on Carl's shoulder. "I got a Benefactor Box from Princess D'Nadia. You remember her now, right Carl?"

"Hm?" Carl said, not looking away from the Baby and the human-centipede tendril of babies sticking out of its spine. "I think we may want to be quiet right now, Donut."

"But you must remember her, Carl! We went over this before. Please say you remember her?"

"What?" He looked over and frowned. "Goddamnit, Donut. Now is not the time!"

"It's always the time for manners, Carl. Princess D'Nadia is probably watching us right now. Thank you, Princess! Say thank you, Carl."

"Thank you, Princess D'Nadia," Carl said. "Head in the game, Donut. That's—oh shit!"

The tendril that had been swaying back and forth and 'staring' at us leaped out of the Baby's spine, soaring on a high arc into the air and then dropping. While it was in mid-air I had a clear view of it: A twelve-meter chain of armless babies, stitched together mouth-to-anus, with the leading baby about the size of my fist and the one at the back the size of my torso. It hit face-down and went into the dirt without resistance, like a diver into water. Feces sprayed out the back as it disappeared underground.

"Wonderful," Carl griped.

"I got a box too," I said. "And a lot of achievements." I wasn't quite sure why I bothered saying it. Like the AI had said, I was going to die here. We had planned, we had prepared, we had done everything right. We had hit the Baby with a bomb of inconceivable power and it was still alive. Alive and recovering. We had nothing left that could possibly deal enough damage to finish it. We were dead.

"Move!" Carl shouted, grabbing me by the shoulder and dragging me to my feet. He leaped to the left with me in tow, Donut went to the right, and the tendril tore its way out of the ground where we had just been, moving straight up like a whale breaching. Donut twisted in mid air and blasted it with a weak Magic Missile before hitting the ground and bounding away.

"I'm out!" the cat said. "Three minutes on my mana potion cooldown!"

The words made me reflexively check my own cooldown to see how long I had left after drinking Carl's healing potion. The answer made me stumble.

Ten hours.

He had given me one of Mordecai's special potions. The ones that made you regenerate at ridiculous speed for thirty seconds. The ones that you could only ever take two of. The ones that Carl had one of and Donut had one of because Mordecai had only had enough ingredients for two and why should the doppelganger meatshield get one?

The brief flare of resentment cleared away some of the cobwebs that had left me dazed and helpless. We weren't dead yet and if I didn't want to die—which I didn't!—then I needed to start thinking.

A tremor shook the ground. I wasn't sure why, but I jumped to the left and pulled Carl with me just as the Baby's tentacle soared out of the ground where we had just been, reeeeing in anger at missing its prey. It reversed course, doubling over on itself so that it fell back into the ground face-first.

"Crap!" Carl said, pulling me close and curling over me as feces rained down.

"Don't get it on you," he said, straightening up. "This shit is toxic as hell."

I couldn't help but giggle at the two puns the man had unwittingly made in three seconds, although the terror and borderline hysteria may have contributed to my sense of amusement. Thank goodness Carl had poison immunity from his cloak.

"Stay here," Carl said. "It's following movement. Stay still while I draw it off." He turned on his heel and ran towards the Baby's slowly healing not-a-corpse, moving in a broken-field zigzag pattern that would hopefully be confusing to anything hunting from underground based on footfalls.

For a moment, I stared stupidly as he ran off. Why was he drawing it off? He was the more valuable—

Reeee!

I glanced over just in time to see another tendril leap out of the Train Baby's spine and slide into the ground. At almost the same moment the first tendril burst out of the ground literally under Carl's feet, taking him offguard.

The baby at the head of the tendril was the size of my fist, its mouth just large enough to swallow Carl's big toe. Which it had done, and was now stuck there because the buff from his pedicure kit made his toes and feet invulnerable so that the tendril could not simply chew its way through and swallow as it had undoubtedly expected.

The back of the tendril whipped over like a mace, clubbing Carl to the ground and spraying yet more feces on him. By the time he hit the ground the tendril had retracted and was coming in for another strike; he met it with a punch of his spiked gauntlet. There was a burst of fire and electricity as his Bang Bro enchantment went off. The tendril spasmed as its last and largest segment was crushed into jelly. The destroyed segment went limp and detached, falling off the chain of babies.

With his bare left hand, Carl grabbed the tendril around the neck of its new final segment and squeezed tight, twisting it to the side to point the business end away while he punched it with his gauntleted right hand. The tendril thrashed, jerking Carl to the side and scraping him against the rough gravel. He went with it, refusing to let go, and the two were quickly in a thrashing, twisting, chaotic mess that looked like an epileptic Ouroboros.

A weight landed on my shoulder as Donut joined me. "What do we do?" she said. "I'm out of mana and I'm still waiting on my potion cooldown."

"I don't...I can't...I don't have anything! I lost all my metal, I'm useless again, and Carl and that thing are thrashing around too much. If I try to hit it I might hit him. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I—"

She thwapped me on the top of my head and I nearly went to my knees. Donut was vastly stronger than any normal human and she hadn't pulled that blow much.

"Stop that! You're smart, so think of something!" Another blow, this one softer.

I nodded jerkily and started riffling through my inventory looking for anything that would help. Seven health potions that I couldn't use until after my potion cooldown wore off. No mana potions; I had no mana-using skills aside from the basic Heal so it had made more sense to give Donut the majority of the potions and a couple to Carl for use with his Bang Bro spell. One poison antidote potion that might or might not be sufficient against Baby poo but, again, I couldn't use it because of the potion cooldown. One alcohol antidote potion that was not relevant right now even if I could use it. A pile of random metal junk that I was lugging around until we could make a larger backpack that it could fit in. Various chunks of wood and plastic from the wreckage left behind on the tracks after Carl demolished the Nightmare Express. Various broken segments of railroad track from when we derailed the Ochre Line train. Paper from somewhere that I couldn't even remember. One of the rolls of duct tape that Carl had acquired from Limp Richard. Broken glass. Fragments of a mirror. More blankets. My axe. One of Carl's boom jugs that I would be way too scared to use now that I wasn't completely covered in metal.

I pulled the axe out and into my hand so that I would at least have a weapon.

"I don't think I can afford to get close to that thing," Donut said, looking at where Carl and the tendril were locked in spastic battle. "It would crush me."

"Maybe—" I broke off as the ground tremored slightly and some instinct sent me leaping back.

Reeeee!!! The second tendril screamed as it leapt up from below where I'd been standing.

Without thinking, I thrust a hand upwards and conjured a blanket out of my inventory so that it appeared draped over me and Donut. Low-power wet impacts told me that it had successfully deflected the enemy's secondary attack.

"That is just disgusting," Donut noted. "It's worse than that skunk that used to wander around the neighborhood. Seriously, who fights with their butt?"

"Shhh." I didn't tell her that I had almost been such a person. Instead, I flipped the blanket back, careful not to touch the outside. When I noticed that it was actively smoking I held it out to the side by my fingertips. I didn't otherwise move, all my awareness focused on my feet.

Katia: Guys, I think it detects vibration, not just movement. Stick to chat.

Donut: GOOD. SEE, I TOLD YOU YOU WERE SMART. NOW FIGURE OUT HOW TO KILL IT.

I turned my head so I could glare at her.

Katia: 'Figure out how to kill it'?!

Donut: SORRY, WAS I UNCLEAR?

I glared at her in frustration and went back to reviewing my inventory to see if it would spark any ideas.

I blinked.

Katia: Donut, how many mana potions do you have?

Carl: A little help here, please!

The tendril lurched, scraping him across the gravel again and slamming his head into a section of railroad track.

Donut: HUSH, CARL. KATIA WAS TALKING.

Carl: Goddamnit, Donut! This thing is fucking strong, and it won't die! Help me before the second one shows up.

I jumped aside as the twitch in the ground presaged the attack of the second tendril. I wasn't quite fast enough this time and the hind end clubbed me in passing, knocking my health down into the yellow in one hit. I quickly hit my Heal spell to get it back into the green.

The tendril also sprayed me with more effluvium; I managed to interpose my poor blanket, which was in the process of dissolving from the earlier attack. None of it got on my skin but some of the smoke went up my nose and seemingly lit my lungs on fire. My health plummeted into the yellow; I jammed on Heal yet again. It slowed the fall but did not completely halt it.

I continued pounding on the the Heal spell until my mana ran out, but I also tossed the blanket away and summoned another one, dumping my axe back into inventory so I could hold the blanket in both hands like a bullfighter's cape. I only had one more blanket after this. I needed to not get hit again.

I started dumping random metal junk out of my inventory and hurling it to my left so that it landed in a staggered progression that could have been someone making three big leaps towards the Baby. Sure enough, a moment later the tendril leapt out of the ground where the last impact had happened. It passed straight through the lump of dwarf metal in the process, the later segments of the tendril sending the remains of the metal flying. The tendril descended back into the ground and was gone again. I tossed another chunk to the left of where it had been, leading it away from Carl.

Katia: Donut, how many mana potions do you have?

Donut: EIGHT. WE USED UP MOST OF MY SUPPLY CHARGING THE BATTERIES FOR THE TRAIN. WHY?

Katia: Carl, I need the Battery Fabricator and some batteries.

Donut: OH, THAT'S A GREAT IDEA! WE CAN HIDE IN A HOLE AGAIN AND BLOW THE BABY UP!

There was another explosion from Carl's Bang Bro spell and the tendril reeed in anger. The Battery Fabricator and a half dozen empty batteries fell out on the ground as Carl and the tendril rolled back and forth.

Katia: Thanks. By the way, you're winning. The tendril's health bar is in the yellow.

Carl: THE YELLOW?! What does it take to kill this thing?!

Donut: KEEP PUNCHING, CARL. OUR VIEWERS ARE LOVING THIS! I'VE GOTTEN FIFTY BILLION NEW FOLLOWERS IN THE LAST THIRTY SECONDS! OH, SAY YOUR CATCHPHRASE! ZEV WANTED YOU TO SAY IT MORE.

How the cat managed to keep an eye on her social numbers while all this was going on, I had no idea.

"Goddamnit, Donut!" Carl yelled out loud.

Donut: GOOD JOB! YOUR ACTING IS REALLY IMPROVING.

Carl: I WASN'T FUCKING ACTING! GET THIS THING OFF OF ME!

He grunted as the tendril smashed him into the ground, lifted him up, and smashed him down again. It massed more than he did and was starting to figure out how to fight when both of its normal attacks were disabled: It had coiled up its midsection to provide stability and a counterbalance while coordinating the motions of the two ends to flip Carl around. He countered by continuing to work his way down the tendril's hind end, destroying one segment at a time while trapping the rest between his feet.

I really hoped that the tendril never got smart enough to stop trying to chew through his invulnerable foot. If it let go and used its front mouth to attack higher up then Carl would be dead in seconds.

Donut: CARL, ROLL TO YOUR RIGHT!

He did, continuing to punch.

Carl: Why? What's happening?! Is there another one?!

Donut: NO, BUT KATIA NEEDS TO GET TO THE FABRICATOR AND YOUR LITTLE TUSSLE WAS IN THE WAY.

Donut: WELL, ACTUALLY, YES. THERE IS ANOTHER ONE, BUT IT'S MOSTLY FOCUSED ON US. KATIA, THROW SOMETHING OVER THAT WAY SO IT STAYS FOCUSED ON US INSTEAD OF ON EATING CARL'S TENDER MAN-BITS.

I hurried over to the Fabricator, tossing chunks of metal to the side as Donut instructed.

Carl: Hey, what about Mongo? Also HURRY UP!

Donut: STOP BEING SUCH A DRAMA QUEEN, CARL. YOU'RE DOING FINE. AND I'M NOT LETTING MONGO OUT WHEN THE MONSTERS ARE HIDING UNDERGROUND. HE MIGHT GET EATEN.

Carl: I might get eaten!

Reeee!

I glanced over just in time to see a third tendril leap out of the Baby's now visibly taller spine. The boss's health bar was still in the red but its recovery was beginning to accelerate.

I reached the Fabricator and knelt down, grabbing one of the batteries and plugging it into the slot while shoving the rest of them into my inventory. Donut didn't need to be told what to do; she was pulling mana potions out of her inventory and dropping them into the Fabricator's intake in a steady rain. As soon as the sixth one entered the intake a cover slid closed over it. The machine rumbled and shook for a moment, and then a bell went ding! and the fully-charged battery popped out. I grabbed the battery in one hand, vanished the Fabricator into my inventory with the other, and dove to my right as a tendril leaped out of the ground where I had been, peppering me with dirt and gravel that knocked a few points off my health. I hurled a chunk of dwarf metal at the monster but didn't even come close. The chunk landed a few meters away; moments later one of the tendrils leaped up through it, reeeing as it went and then diving back into the earth.

I rolled to my feet and tossed another two chunks of steel in the direction that I had been moving. Seconds later, a tendril leapt out of the ground where each chunk had struck. The farther tendril, distinguishable by virtue of being the largest of the three that were currently on the field, went straight up. The nearer tendril came out of the ground at an angle that would have struck me mid-torso if I'd been exactly where it expected and at least knocked me down if I'd been a step or so to either side.

Donut: HEY, THAT'S NOT FAIR! THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO GET SMARTER!

I dropped the battery into my inventory to free up my hands, replacing it with a roll of duct tape and a chunk of railroad tie ten centimeters longer than the width of the leading baby's mouth. Being as quiet as I could, I taped the heavy chunk of wood to the sole of my left shoe, using many loops of tape to ensure that it would be secure, and ensuring that I didn't cover my toenails. I set the foot down as gently as possible, then conjured another chunk and did the same for my right shoe. The two chunks were not the same height and I ended up canting to the left if I didn't keep one knee slightly bent.

Donut: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Katia: You'll see in a second.

Reeeee!

Great. A fourth tendril had dropped out of the Baby's spine and entered the fray. I quickly tossed some more random junk out in my general area. We needed to keep them focused on me and Donut, since Carl couldn't defend himself against a second one at the same time as he fought the first.

Donut: KATIA, MOVE!

I leaped to the left, throwing junk to the right as I went. Alpha, as I had mentally dubbed the smart tendril, hurled itself through the space I'd been standing in and then slid back into the ground amidst a spray of poo.

Katia: There was no warning!

Donut: DON'T WORRY. I'M WATCHING THEM ON THE MINIMAP.

I frowned and checked my minimap. The only dots on it were mine, Carl's, Donut's, and Brandy's white dot off to the side.

Donut: THEY SHOW UP ON MY MAP. OBVIOUSLY BECAUSE I HAVE MUCH BETTER SENSES THAN YOU PUNY HUMANS.

More importantly, she had that Acute Ears skill that gave her what Carl called 'monster vision'. Well, good. She could spot for me and Carl while we focused on causing damage. And presumably that was why she'd been so flippant about leaving Carl on his own. The tendril was pounding him back and forth against the ground but it wasn't inflicting a lot of damage. The Regeneration skill granted by his shirt was probably helping too.

I brought forth a length of railroad tie the appropriate length to serve as a quarterstaff and got ready to execute my cunning plan.

Reeeee! Another one dropped off the Baby's spine and into the ground. This was getting ridiculous. Five of them?!

Donut: STOP MOVING, CARL. STAY STILL.

I looked over to see that Carl had finally killed his attacker and had been trying to pry it off of his foot.

Carl: What's going on?

Donut: KATIA ALREADY TOLD YOU THIS, CARL. IT'S RUDE TO IGNORE PEOPLE.

Carl: I was a little distracted, okay?! Fill me in.

Katia: They're attracted to vibration, including speech. They attack by jumping out of the ground, but there's a tremor right beforehand. It gives just enough time to jump if you're paying attention.

Carl: With my buff active my feet are pretty much numb. I can't feel any tremors in the ground.

Donut: AND THAT'S WHY I TOLD YOU TO STAY STILL, DOOFUS. LET KATIA HANDLE THIS ONE. SHE'S SMART.

Katia: Donut, are you deliberately standing back and telling me to solve things while not contributing anything yourself just because you want to boost my confidence so that I'll be more interesting to the viewers?

Donut: YES.

Well, at least she was honest about it.

Donut: ALSO I AM CONTRIBUTING. I'M SPOTTING FOR YOU AND TELLING YOU TO HURRY UP AND BE SMART.

I growled silently and looked around, trying to get a sense of where the tendrils were.

There were five on the field, then Carl killed his which left four. The one that I mentally dubbed Alpha, the oldest and smallest, was moving back and forth across the battlefield in a series of long, criss-crossing bounds. The other three were underground, waiting for a trace of prey.

Donut: GOSH, THAT SURE IS GROSS THE WAY THAT THING IS JUMPING AROUND. I HOPE IT'S NOT DOING ANYTHING IMPORTANT.

Carl: Goddamnit, Donut! Stop screwing around and tell us if you see something! Work on Katia's self-esteem later!

Donut lay her ears back in irritation and hissed softly.

Donut: FINE. IT PROPELS ITSELF BY SHOOTING POO OUT THE BACK. IT'S MOVING AROUND IN A CHECKERBOARD, LEAVING LINES OF TOXIC POO EVERYWHERE TO CORRAL US INTO A SMALLER AREA.

Damnit, how had I missed that one? Fannar had been right when he said that I was dumber than a cat.

I watched Alpha's passage carefully. It was moving right-to-left in front of me, getting closer. It would pass by in five...four...three...two...one...

I tossed a chunk of metal a little ways in front of myself and stretched the pole out, ready to smack the monster as it went past.

Alpha leapt out of the ground, curling up and over to pass through the air where my hips would have been if it had been me instead of a decoy chunk of metal on that spot. I swung my ersatz staff around as fast as I could, trying to pin the creature to the ground, but the tendril was gone back under the dirt before I could get close.

Donut: YOU NEED TO MOVE FASTER.

Katia: Sorry, I'm doing my best.

Carl: Take a breath, you can do this.

I followed directions and took a breath, letting it out as slowly and quietly as I could. A few meters behind me I heard a reeee and two faint sounds as one of the larger tendrils got tired of waiting and leapt out of and back into the ground at a random point.

Donut: YOU SHOULD PROBABLY HURRY UP. THAT BLUE BARRIER IS CLOSING IN. YOU'VE GOT MAYBE A MINUTE BEFORE IT GETS HERE.

I grit my teeth in annoyance and kept looking to see where Alpha was moving.

Carl: You need to lure it to a predictable spot on a predictable course.

What was the American term? 'Mansplaining'?

I still had a decent amount of junk in my inventory but I had a feeling it was going to get less useful as time went on. Alpha, and presumably the others, seemed to be learning. Soon enough it would be able to identify and ignore the heavy singular thud of a decoy.

Carl: If you can get it somewhere predictable, I can hit it with my xistera.

Donut: YOU MEAN YOU CAN HIT IT WITH YOUR BALLS, RIGHT?

Carl: Goddamnit, Donut.

Donut: DON'T. YOU WOULD NEED TO MOVE AND YOU'LL JUST ATTRACT THE OTHERS. JUST LIE THERE LIKE A GOOD BOY AND LET KATIA AND I DEAL WITH IT.

I took a breath and braced myself for pain as I rapidly transformed. My body shortened, the mass retasked to grow a third arm and extend it one, two, three, three and a half meters. It was the longest I could make it and still have enough mass to provide a sufficient counterbalance. It felt pretty much like setting myself on fire.

I reached to the left as far as I could and thumped the ground with my fist, moving left to right in my best approximation of running footsteps.

Alpha came bounding out of the dirt on a poo rocket, coming from what would have been behind me and at chest height if that had been me running. It reeeed in frustration at being duped again. I ignored it and hurried to shift the pole closer to where the tendril's arc would have it reentering the dirt. I squeezed my eyes shut, jammed the prongs of the battery against my metal pole, and pushed the button.

There was a massive thunderclap as Alpha passed within a handspan of the pole and electricity arced. Despite being braced for it, despite being well enough insulated that I only got a tingle, the noise and reverberant thud still startled me into dropping the pole and stumbling back. Donut was thrown off balance and shifted back and forth on my shoulder, claws digging in as she fought to keep her balance. I ignored the pain and scrabbled after the pole.

Graceless as I had been, the plan had worked. The electricity had passed through Alpha like an arc welder, vaporizing the flesh it touched and cooking the adjacent edges. The tendril's motion carried it through the arc, sweeping the blazing electric fire across nearly every segment. The thing was dead in a stinking, charbroiled pile before the sparkles had faded from my vision.

"Move!" Donut yelled.

I moved, taking five quick steps and then crouching down and thumping the ground ahead of me with my stretched-out arm to make it seem that I had continued forward, curved to the right, and stopped. I swung the pole around to be near where I was theoretically standing.

Reeeeee!!! / Reeeeee!!!

Charlie, the largest of the tendrils currently on the field, soared out of the ground in a vertical strike that came within a whisker of eating the end of the pole. It was more than enough to earn another arc along its length that left it a smoldering husk on the ground. Unfortunately, the second scream had been the sound of another, yet larger, tendril leaping out of the Baby's spine and into the earth. Worse, the Baby's health bar was at 15%, maybe 20%, up from the sliver it had been when we dug ourselves out of our protective foxhole.

Carl: We need to destroy its spine. That's where the regeneration is happening. I've been watching, and more of those baby-centipede tendrils keep coming out. Most of them crawl out of the spine and across the body, then melt into normal flesh, which makes the health bar go up. It's only occasionally that they come onto the field to hunt us.

"Move!" Donut yowled, not taking time to mentally type.

I spun to the left and ran, trusting the cat. A plopping sound and a foul stench told me that one of the other tendrils had leapt over approximately where I'd been standing, leaving a trail of poo behind. Fifteen-ish meters in front of me, another tendril crossed from right to left, trailing more poo. I glanced to the sides; there were more lines of it in each direction. They were only a meter or so wide and made up of splatters, not solid lines, but the smoke rising from the dirt suggested that stepping on even a small spot would be a bad idea. Remembering what momentarily breathing that smoke had done to me, I had no desire to tempt fate.

I stopped and crouched, using my extended arm to make decoy footfalls as though I had turned hard right in an attempt to lose pursuit. No sooner had I pulled my arm back then another tendril leaped up through the spot that I had notionally been standing. I swung the battery around but didn't get it there in time.

I punched more 'frantic footfalls' into the ground from where the tendril had been to a spot a few meters away, trying to make it sound like a desperate dodge. No sooner had 'I' come to a stop then another tendril went up through that spot.

The battery was ready this time. It arced as the monster went up, but the arc was weaker. Still enough; it slagged the first half of the tendril and left the second half twitching spasmodically...but the battery's charge light was now dark.

Katia: I'm out of juice and Donut doesn't have enough potions to recharge the battery.

Carl: Damnit. Okay, keep the worms distracted.

Donut: CARL, ARE YOU ABOUT TO DO SOMETHING STUPID?

Carl: The Baby is surrounded by a moat of toxic crap and I'm the only one immune to poison who isn't fragile as glass. I can run over and take out the Baby's spine.

Katia: The poo is acidic as well. It ate through my blankets. Not immediately, but it did.

Carl: Well, here's hoping that my feet are immune to acid.

Katia: What about throwing explosives from your scoop thing?

Carl: Xistera. I'm not accurate enough and I don't have a good angle. We don't have time to debate this. Those things are laying down more and more trails of crap, sectioning up where we can and can't move. You don't have much room to maneuver right now. Also, that blue force field around us is contracting, pushing us towards the Baby.

I glanced over to check on the barrier; he was right. It had moved easily ten meters since the fight began, leaving our foxhole now unreachable.

Three of the tendrils reeeeed out of the ground, two of them in my general area and the other far off on the opposite side of the Baby. Two more dropped off the Baby's spine simultaneously.

Donut: CAN WE GET THE WORM THINGS TO FIGHT EACH OTHER?

That...was brilliant.

Katia: Donut, watch behind us.

Donut: WHAT DO YOU THINK I'VE BEEN DOING?

I reached out and started thumping the ground in a footfall pattern, moving back and forth like someone pacing. tap, tap, move the hand away. tap, tap, move the hand away

Donut: STOP DOING THAT FOR A SECOND.

A weak Magic Missile seared out to my right, blasting through one of the larger tendrils that had just breached. The two pieces hit the ground, thrashing back and forth and reeeeing in pain.

Donut: I'M OUT OF MANA AGAIN. TEN SECONDS LEFT ON MY POTION COOLDOWN.

We waited, frozen and hopeful. Fifteen seconds later, four more tendrils leapt out of the ground, vaporizing their way through their dying fellows on the way up and then again on the way down. The whole thing descended into a maddened feeding frenzy as the pain made the dying segments thrash harder which made the others leap again and again until nothing remained of the original victims...but in the process, one of the other worms got clipped and suddenly the whole thing started over.

Of course, by the time those four had finished killing each other, six more had dropped off the Baby. The boss's health bar was now at the bottom of yellow and its left arm had stitched itself back onto the body.

The six new contenders came in with the wisdom of their predecessors already in place. They moved in horizontal arcs instead of more easily dodged vertical leaps. They stitched back and forth across the field, spraying poo everywhere in regular patterns. Two of them came near me, forcing me to dodge. I used thrown junk and tapped-out impacts to disguise my location, but they were zeroing in on me and my safe area was shrinking quickly.

"This is going to suck," Carl muttered out loud. Then he was on his invulnerable feet and sprinting towards the Baby. His Dexterity, still superhuman despite not being his best stat, let him leave Usain Bolt in the dust as he easily broke eight seconds for the 100-meter dash.

I'd lost count of how many tendrils were on the field now, but there were at least eight. Six of them came for him, lunging at the sound of his footfalls. He was faster than most of them expected, their attacks landing behind him, but two crossed in front of him, blasting poo everywhere. He duck-and-covered under his blanket as the acidic filth spattered over him. I saw the blanket smoldering but he didn't cast it aside. Instead, he gripped it closed with his left hand and hurled a stick of dynamite with his right.

The dynamite arced forward, up and over the Baby's partially-rebuilt thigh, and landed in the cradle of its pelvis. The blast sent blood and gore flying and the boss's health bar went down again, but only a sliver.

Carl pivoted and ran to the left, clockwise around the Baby's back, hurling more dynamite while being sure to stay in the blast shadow of the thigh. The tendrils were closing in on him and he was having to splash across layers of toxic green/brown muck.

Crap! Why was I standing here, watching and being useless?!

I dropped Carl's boom jug out of my inventory into my third hand, lit the torch, and spun to build momentum before hurling it as hard as I could.

My arm was over three meters long, giving me massive leverage, and I'd been sinking most of my points into Strength for the last dozen levels. The jug arced up and up, peaked, and came back down. Through pure luck and definitely not skill, it detonated as it was passing over the Baby's thigh and the blazing fire spread in an arc across its leg and the inside of its stomach cavity. The Baby had no vocal apparatus with which to scream but it vibrated fiercely, the left (and only) arm waving around frantically and uselessly trying to beat the fire out. I watched the health bar plummet, dropping it back into the top of the red before the flames burned out.

"Carl, look out!" Donut yelled, dumping all of her finally-refilled mana pool into a furious barrage of Magic Missiles. Three of the tendrils had been leaping at Carl from ahead and to the side; her spells blew them to fragments and cleared his path. Unfortunately, there were too many remaining—eight or nine of them coming at him from all the left-side points of the compass—and she was once more out of mana with her potion cooldown reset.

Carl hurled something small to his left, blasting in half a tendril that was in the process of reentering the ground. It took that one out but the rest leaped over their fallen siblings and kept coming for him. He pivoted to the right and sprinted frantically towards the Baby, pulling another stick of dynamite from his inventory. My breath caught in my lungs as I realized what he was doing: Suicide bombing the base of the Baby's spine.

"CARL, NO!" Donut shouted. "DON'T! I NEED YOU!"

Carl was splashing through the moat of filth that surrounded the Baby, the tendrils coursing on his heels in long, low bounds that covered ground at a blistering pace. They were gaining on him, but not fast enough to catch him before he achieved his mission. He reached the Baby's back and I gasped, expecting him to punch forward to embed the dynamite in the boss's flesh.

Instead, he kept running, one foot stretching forward and finding purchase among the folds of the Boss's diaper. He leaped, then leaped again, charging up the monster's back as though it were a warp wall. He went up until he started to run out of speed, and then he dropped the dynamite and pushed off.

The tendrils that had been pursuing him hunted by vibration, not by sight; they didn't know what was in front of them. They hit the Baby's back and reeeeeed in delight at a successful hunt as they passed effortlessly through its quivering flesh.

Carl's dynamite went off behind him. He was jumping, his body aligned horizontally with arms extended to minimize profile so that he could hide behind the tiny shield of his invulnerable feet.

The blast front caught him, first on those glittering, AI-beloved indestructible feet, and hurled him away. He went soaring up and out, clear across the brown moat, hit the ground hard and rolled limply.

The boss music cut off and the blue force wall vanished. All around us, the poo sank slowly into the ground.

And the winner is... The Royal Court of Princess Donut!

All three of our avatars appeared in midair. On the left it showed me life-size, in my natural form, waving with a fingerless right hand. On the opposite side Donut's avatar was rearing up and slashing at the air with her front paws, which suddenly had claws the size of Mongo's. Carl was in the center, thirty percent bigger than his actual body and more muscled, grinning like a maniac and giving the cheesey two-handed thumbs-up that the Fonz used to do on that old Happy Days show.

Donut: CARL! CARL! ARE YOU OKAY?!

He sat up slowly, limbs uncoordinated and body swaying for several seconds before he got himself together.

Carl: I'm fine. Also, ow. Please tell me it's dead?

Donut: IT'S DEAD. FIVE OR SIX OF THE WORMS WENT THROUGH IT, AND AT LEAST ONE OF THEM MUST HAVE CAUGHT ITS SPINE. GOOD JOB.

He staggered to his feet, hands on his knees as he steadied himself before straightening up and coming over.

New Achievement: Not Touching, Can't Get Mad!

You killed something using no magic and without touching your victim!

Reward: A Silver Clever Rabbit Box!

New Achievement: Screw Zeus!

You killed something using a non-magical electrical attack!

Reward: A Silver Nicola Tesla Box!

New Achievement: I Contributed!

Your attack took a City Boss into the red! You needed someone else's gear to do it, but at least you were kinda useful!

Reward: A Silver Participation Box!

New Achievement: Urban Renewal!

You have killed a City boss!

Reward: A Gold Boss Box!

New Achievement: Undermanned and Outgunned!

You have killed a City boss with fewer than fifty crawlers!

Reward: A Silver Dumbass Box!

New Achievement: Massively Undermanned and Outgunned!

You have killed a City boss with fewer than twenty crawlers!

Reward: A Gold Super Dumbass Box!

New Achievement: Leeeroy Jenkins!

You have killed a City boss with fewer than ten crawlers!

Reward: A Platinum 'I Guess Lucky Really Is Better Than Good' Box!

Level Up! Level Up! Level Up!

"Damnit," Carl griped as he walked up, waving away what must have been his own list of achievements. "That shit burned my toe ring off."

"Well, the ring did make you look like one of those dirty hippy wannabes," Donut said, with a degree of non-sympathy that only a cat could manage.