The Tower of Infinite Evil [A LitRPG Horror Comedy]

The Guild Reunited

We found Lawrence the Barbarian alive and ashamed that he hadn't been able to use his axe to defend the civilians from the monsters. He'd gained a lot of experience anyways; apparently the old Distressed title that he'd gained from getting rescued by me all that time ago gave him a portion of the quest experience we gained for rescuing them. In fact, a lot of the people here had gained titles and classes in the struggle. Most of them were useless ones, though none as bad as mine, and some even had gained things like 'survivor', 'convict' or 'resilient', which seemed to have actual abilities and advantages.

After the immediate chaos and recovery were over, I decided to look for information. If this Glouach had been one of the apprentices we had been warned about, any writing by him would be extremely useful, and I was still hoping there would be spell scrolls.

I started my search of the room with the laboratory. It was just a couple of desks with notes, ingredients and alembics upon it, but it was also the closest thing to a study area in the room, which is exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for. At first I thought I would be disappointed, as the surface of the desk was mostly covered in what I could only call alchemy tools- maybe useful in the long run, but not the kind of stuff I could easily carry around with me. Say what you will about my synthetic wizard robe, that thing had had a lot of pockets with a lot of stationary in it, all of which was now ruined. My trouser pockets were also full and not large enough to carry medieval sets of intricate brass and glass chemistry sets.

As I was looking over the desk, Clarence approached. I only now noticed that some of the acid burns on his face weren't healing. It wasn't some Two-Face shit, but it looked like, even with magical healing, it would leave some serious scars.

"Interesting stuff, this. I was never particularly proficient in chemistry, but from what I managed to glance, this doesn't seem to have very much to do with carbon chains or Mendeleev," he said.
"Well I can't carry it around. Feel free to take whatever you think might be useful," I said.
"I think we will manage to do just that. With a little help from our rescued friends over here. I should like to thank you very much indeed, Mr. Vorhal. I was just about to leap in a desperate last attempt to assassinate that damned squid when I heard your voice in my mind," he said, "I would have gone for the heart, which, as Ms. Hannah demonstrated, would have been entirely futile."
"I just had to do something, it was the only thing I could think of," I said.
"Well it worked out, and therefore it was a cunning stratagem," Clarence said.
"I keep thinking I could have saved more, if I had been stronger," I said.
"I encourage you to find some self-worth, Mr. Vorhal. You cannot imposter's syndrome your way out of being a hero," Clarence said.
"A hero," I laughed, "I have words in black, magical ink on white paper saying I am exactly the opposite."
"This little book," he said, waving his own Journal in his hand, "Is a useful tool created by evil intent. Very much like an iPhone."

I laughed, and we went back to investigating the desk of the laboratory. There were notebooks and papers in the drawers after all; only the top two on each side contained nothing but strange powders and vials. In the lower shelves, however, there were three leatherbound tomes, and a pile of loose parchment filling up nearly the entire desk. The strange magic that allowed me to read everything in the Tower (or was it all actually written in English?) didn't seem to work with these. There were some sigils that reminded me of spellcasting ones, but that was the closest thing to sense I was able to get out of it. Still, it was valuable. I was sure that there must be some way to translate the writing, if by no other means, then by finding an apprentice of the architect of this place that was actually willing to cooperate. I mean my experiences with them here had so far been two for two horrible, but among hundreds of thousands of people there just statistically had to be a few reasonable ones. So long as they were capable of reason and independent thought, there was no way that they were all raving murderous lunatics.

Among the many tools, weapons and supplies of the fish-men, I did manage to find an odd-smelling backpack. It was black, and looked like it would be oily, but it was water-tight and dry on the inside, so I threw all the papers in there, hoping to translate them later. Then I got to the real looting.

The survivors had managed to retrieve the ten spears that were used by their captors, and besides that Lawrence had gotten his axe back, and two more humans were now armed with shortswords and daggers. They were all still horribly untrained and underleveled, but they weren't entirely defenseless anymore, and, at least at this stage, most of the monsters could still be killed by repeatedly stabbing them with sharp sticks. Spears were good too- the history of weaponry has always been about hurting the other guy as quickly as possible, as badly as possible, and from as far away as possible. Spears had an undeniable advantage in reach over most melee weapons, and even the four-foot harpoons would be longer than almost any of the swords we had found in the Tower so far. With the possible exception of Hannah's greatsword.

So I went looking for more stuff. I stopped by the blended pile of calamari flesh formerly known as Glouach and I poked at the remains with a broom handle. Most of his gear appeared to be ruined, certainly his robes were in tatters, and the spellbook he had clutched to was also in tatters. Much like the spellbook of the other apprentice it was burned black, all but confirming my self-destruct theory.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

And at the same time, there was nothing to do but to kneel down and get into the wet, oily mess with my own hands. Whatever the most potent items in the room were, they certainly would have been on his person. 'Meat, this is just meat,' I thought, as I rummaged through the broken, rubbery flesh. I came upon two cylindrical pieces. The first was a metallic rod with the top piece in the shape of- unimaginatively- an octopus. The second was a hard wood case, scraped, but not really damaged by the ice shards.

"Alright, everyone's had enough time to rest," Artemis said, "Hannah, Alex, let's talk tactics, everyone else, I'll ask that you do what we tell you just for now."

The stunned civilians didn't talk back, and the rest of us even less so. We went to our leader, and gave our reports.

It did seem that the activity in the hallways was going down. Back when it had first reached the second day it seemed that there were monsters rushing to and fro every few seconds, but as we proceeded down the hallway in a group of more than thirty, it took nearly twenty minutes before we encountered the first group of enemies. It was a testament to Artemis' leadership- as much as she insisted that she wasn't a leader- that none of the arrayed non-combatants broke and fled. She had explained to everyone that running is a good way to get shot in the back or run into more danger. Knowing that was one thing, but when the pack of goblins came charging at us with short spears and bows, I expected at least some of them to run. Twenty-four hours ago I probably would have ran myself.

Our formation was basic and common sense. We had spears, and even the smallest human among us had more reach than a goblin. The traditional formation in such an engagement, in these narrow hallways, would have been a shield wall. We did not have shields, but we had me. I made the wall in a checkered pattern, so that the largest area could be covered. It left holes, but we needed holes to stab through anyways, the only issue was that no one but me could see it. But my timing was acceptable, so while the terrified humans had a few seconds to find the hole in the wall nearest to them, the goblins charged into the invisible wall without pause. Once again, several hit the wall at a dead sprint, which knocked them back over.

Then, when Lawrence started swinging leaned through a window inside the invisible wall, and now that the spell of nervous stillness among the humans was broken, they got to stabbing.

All in all it went much better than anyone could have expected. The worst of the injuries was an arrow in a shoulder, though a middle-aged woman had taken a sword cut dangerously close to her eye. It'd leave the classic badass warrior scar, if she lived long enough to gain levels.

"Damn," I said, to Hannah.
"Hm?" she grunted.
"I was hoping to leave you all behind in the library. There is some research I need to do," I said.

"Need the wall," she said.
"Yeah, that's what I just figured out. It's kind of ridiculously useful," I said.
"Would be dead without it. Both of us," she said.
"And I bet these dweebs wouldn't have taken a head-on charge from a goblin band half as well without me," I said.
Hannah snorted, and, again, laughter was always an action of intent with her now. "I'd put my money on the goblin band. Even with Artemis here," she said.
"No chance, I bet you could take them down yourself," I said.
"Look," she said and gestured towards the band of former civilians.

The people were all of them fixed to their journals. It was odd, I would have expected for all of them to get the same class- spearman, soldier, militia, something like that- but it seemed that they mostly got different ones. About ten of them did get a variation of spear or fighter classes, but just as many got classes related to battlefield support, tactics and some even got titles implying an advancement down an officer path- I was pretty sure lieutenant was as low as those sorts of things went. We'd gained two- the newly scarred woman, Courtney McKinley, was now Lieutenant Human Defender and a man that had been staying well behind the wall was now another lieutenant, though he refused to divulge his class. Hell, what could I, a Coward by class, say. He did introduce himself as Darryl.

"They're all finally getting their classes. Seems useful," I said.
"Yeah, but what aren't they doing if they are doing that?" she said.

And it was true. There was no sense of organization. Artemis, Hannah and myself were looking out for danger, but we had just defaulted to doing so, there hadn't been a discussion. Even so, they had all pretty much dropped their spears and started checking their stats as soon as the fighting was over. I could understand it. Hell, I was happy about it. If they associated combat with immediate reward, they would be more willing to fight in the future. I did not just think that, I thought.

"It's not like I'm the scoutmaster general. You and Artemis do ninety percent of the looking out," I said.
"I'm just saying that without you we lose 30% of combat effectiveness. We are shepherding these people, make no mistake. They are a liability," Hannah said.
"Damn, just leave them behind?" I said.
"Shut it. Friendship is a liability. Honor. All that shit. But we pick and choose when we make things harder for ourselves, so that we can sleep at night," she said.
"Except you don't sleep anymore," I said.
"Indeed I do not," she said. Well Hell, at this point I had known the zombie warrior Hannah for longer than Soccer Team Captain Hannah, and I liked her. She had always been practical, but certainly she had grown coldly so in the last day. And I was pretty sure she was at least mostly ironic about the whole leaving mortal ethics and morality aside now that she had shed that illness of warm blood.
"Fair enough. So be it then, there and back again, a classic tale of fantasy. Let's get these people to safety and see if some of them don't get enough experience to be useful for steps two to question mark," I said.

And so it was that we set out on the treacherous journey towards the safe room. It took us a little over two hours, we encountered five groups of enemies in this given time and bested them all. We lost two more people. It was a miracle that it went so good. Amir Fadel died when a spray of poisonous rose thorns thrown by a monster made of a tentacular mass of the flowers shot him through a hole in my shield. Marianna Kuznakova jumped into a classroom while dodging an attack by instinct, and found herself pulled into some sort of a grinding, rusted mechanical machine and died screaming. Everyone but my party gained several levels. Clarence got one. And we were within sight of the safe room, ready to reunite the two disparate parts of the adventuring guild group.