Kevin lumbered forward with an incoherent roar. As he closed the distance, a blade of blue light exploded outward from his belly, whirling toward me with the force of a canon blast. Although the physical lawnmower blade continued to spin away inside his torso, this projectile appeared to be a perfect replica.

  I acted on instinct and reached out with a strand of telekinetic power, attempting to intercept the projectile before it could decapitate me. Unfortunately, there was nothing for me to grab. Although the blade appeared to be a physical object, I quickly realized it was forged from hardened air and reinforced with mana.

  “Fuck,” I grumbled as I dove into a forward roll. The blade narrowly passed over me before it smashed into the side of the meat house. The conjured blade dissipated on impact, though it left behind a nasty, oozing gash in its wake.

  I rolled to my feet, activated Fault Spike, and hurled a spit of razor-sharp rock right at the deformed monstrosity. The earthen spear slammed straight into the Kevin’s shoulder, sinking all the way down to the bone and very nearly amputating the arm in the process. The limb dangled by a few grisly strands of red meat, but Kevin didn’t seem to register the damage or the pain. An explosion of red light enveloped the monster in a bloody aura, and I could feel the rage radiating off the creature as though it were a physical thing. Kevin’s muscles bulged and a huge vein began pulsing in his forehead.

  If looks could kill, I’d be dead where I stood.

  “How many times have I told you not to throw things inside the house!” Kevin bellowed, even though we weren’t inside the house at all. “You’re gonna pay for that, you little shit! I told you next time this happened I’d get the belt.” He reached toward his waist and pulled free a belt that was easily seven feet long and covered in nails and wrapped in barbed wire.

  Cold fear washed over me, and the blood drained from my face.

  Kevin charged, whip in hand, his torso blade screaming. I backpedaled and sent my tools streaking forward to meet the enraged homeowner head-on.

  My small arsenal whirled around the misshapen man like a dust devil of wood and steel, stabbing at his eyes and face, bludgeoning his limbs with bone breaking force. He shrugged off the onslaught as though the tools were nothing more than buzzing mosquitoes. A red health bar flickered to life above the creature’s head, but it was draining at an alarmingly sluggish rate. It wasn’t hard to figure out why.

  Kevin’s wounds were healing at an impossibly fast speed.

  Tiny yellow tentacles wriggled from the deep gouge in the man’s mangled arm, pulling the limb back into place and sealing the wound. More tendrils were quickly mending the damage my tools were dealing as well.

  The only saving grace seemed to be the Septic Shiv, which I’d looted off the corpse of the Silent-but-Deadly Assassin. The blade sliced and diced better than a Ginsu knife, leaving deep lacerations all along Kevin’s chest and arms. But these weren’t regular wounds. Jagged black lines of infection crept outward from each nick and slash, eating through Dweller’s HP and slowing his god-like healing factor.

  On my left, Temperance hurled a ball of spiders directly into Kevin’s face, but as with so many of my attacks, the monster didn’t even notice. With a snarl, Temperance jumped up and sprinted along invisible currents of air, then launched herself at the man with her meat cleaver.

  The edge of her blade carved off chunks of flesh, which landed on the grass with wet thwaps, but they didn’t stay put for long. Each slab of meat immediately sprouted a legion of tiny yellow tentacles and crawled back toward their host like a dog returning to its master.

  “Disease,” I hollered. “Use Smallpox Blanket!”

  Even though the name was incredibly fucked up, Smallpox Blanket was one of Temp’s best DPS abilities. It was a Rare-grade Relic that afflicted anyone she cut with a strain of Super Smallpox. At my urging, her cleaver’s blade suddenly burned with a nauseating green glow. She snarled and brought the weapon down with a thwack, burying it deep in the man’s collarbone. Immediately, new boils rippled outward from the sight of the wound, going to war with the open lesions that were already present.

  Kevin’s HP took a significant hit but, once again, he didn’t seem to notice or care.

  Hell, he didn’t even try to stop her. The truth was, he barely even seemed to realize she existed. Kevin only seemed to have eyes for me, the rule breaker.

  As the monstrous Dweller closed the distance and swiped at me with the belt-whip, I put my Physic Sovereignty ability to good use and shot straight up into the air, out of the monster’s reach. I came to a stop a good ten feet up, not far from the edge of the roof.

  That was my next big mistake.

  My Spelunker’s Sixth Sense didn’t flash a warning until it was almost too late. Crouched low on top of the roof was one of the many Kathys—though like her male counterpart, she barely resembled the army of soccer moms I’d seen so far.

  Dweller 0.19728B – Symbiotic HOA Thrall [Level 28]

  She had far too many eyes and a circular, lamprey-like mouth lined with jagged teeth. Unlike Kevin’s massive, muscular frame, however, the “new and improved” Kathy was emaciated and eerily skeletal. Oozing syringe needles protruded from her cheeks and her skin hugged every single bone, transforming the woman into a living ghoul in too tight yoga pants. She rose into the air, suspended by massive tentacles of hair that cascaded down from her scalp.

  Kathy let out a shrill shriek then hurled herself at me, her hands outstretched and reaching for my throat. She had broken pieces of wine bottle lodged into the ends of each finger, replacing her nails completely.

  I shot back through the air, raised one hand, and activated Hydro Fracking Blast—unleashing a jet of industrial-strength fire water right into her stomach. The beam of burning liquid drilled a hole through her middle and cut her cleanly in two. Well, that’s not true. There was nothing clean about it. It didn’t kill her either. Like her male counterpart, this lady was tough as old boot leather with a healing factor that could rival Deadpool.

  Even worse, my Hydro Blast didn’t stop her either. Not completely.

  Newton’s First Law of Motion held true, and the top half of Kathy kept flying straight toward me while the bottom half toppled twelve feet to the ground.

  Unlike with the previous injuries, the magic seemed to do far more lasting damage.

  Still Kathy was level 28 and although she looked as weak and frail as a newborn kitten, she had the strength of a silverback gorilla all hopped up on cheap wine and Xanax. What was left of her collided with me and sent us into a chaotic tailspin, spiraling straight toward the ground. We crash-landed a heartbeat later and tumbled across the hair-covered lawn. Something in my shoulder popped as we finally came to a halt, her upper body sprawled on top of mine.

  She didn’t have legs and what passed for her guts dangled out from the grievous wound.

  She should’ve been dead.

  She wasn’t. She was just pissed.

  Kathy jabbed at my throat with her broken wine bottle fingernails. I was ready and called out my activation word as I palmed two cards from my black deck. “Comatose Clone, Comatose Clone!” I shouted in a panic.

  The cards blurred and suddenly there were two deformed and glassy eyed Dans standing a few feet away, their jaws slack, their arms hanging limply by their sides. Kathy’s nails sunk into my throat and pain erupted as white spots danced across my vision. A wrist-thick strand of tentacle hair shot forward like a cobra and punched through my flimsy shirt and into my stomach.

  The pain was enormous. A handful of red-hot coals shoved into my intestines.

  True, the clones soaked up most of the damage, but I still endured one hundred percent of the pain. Kathy was literally eviscerating me while frantically attempting to rip my throat out and she wasn’t doing a half-bad job. I wheezed, struggling to breathe, while the tentacle continued to jiggle around inside my guts. My HP was plummeting, and I couldn’t survive this for much longer, even with the Clones. With a snarl, I hit the former soccer mom with a blast of concentrated Existential Dread, hoping to stop her in her tracks.

  The spell failed. Miserably. A prompt flashed in the corner of my eye.

  While connected to the greater HOA Hive mind, Symbiotic Thralls are immune from all psionic-based spells and abilities.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Well shit. Resistant to physical attacks and immune from mind-based spells.

  That sucked a bag full of dicks.

  But then I realized how stupid I was being.

  Although monster Kathy was stronger than me, she only weighed like sixty pounds, max. Especially since she was only half a person. I reached out with a strand of telekinetic power, yanked her ass off of me, then casually fast balled her across the yard and right into the side of the house. She hit headfirst and her neck snapped with a crunch. That took another hefty bite out of her HP, though it didn’t kill her. She just pushed herself up onto her hands and glared at me with her head twisted oddly to one side.

  “You’re the reason mommy drinks!” She shrieked at me, before spitting… something at me, though I had no idea what.

  I quickly activated Sterilization Field, hoping to rob the spell of its magic, but the projectile sailed right through the shimmering white dome and slammed into my chest, knocking the air from my lungs.

  It was a giant orange hairball.

  Or, at least, that’s what I thought until it started hissing and clawing at me.

  Nope. Not a hairball at all. A ball of cats.

  And when I say ball of cats, I don’t mean several cats shoved together. No, this was a basketball sized lump of fur and flesh made from assorted cat pieces. There were at least a dozen blinking cat eyes, several fang-filled mouths, and feline limbs poking out at random angles. This was just like Temp’s Ball of Spiders spell, but infinitely worse somehow. The orange hairball was a vicious, living thing driven by rage and hate and unbearable pain. Tiny claws scratched at my arms and face, trying frantically to gouge my eyes out.

  You are afflicted with Cat Scratch Fever, reducing your Health Regeneration by 25% for two minutes.

  Perfect. That was just what I needed.

  I yanked free my tactical speed square then drove the triangular tip right into the ball of writhing tails and limbs. The blow managed to knock the living hair ball off, then I punted the damned thing a few feet away. It growled and rolled toward me again, but this time I picked it up with a strand of telekinesis and hurled the fury abomination straight at Kevin. Or more precisely, into Kevin’s whirling lawnmower stomach.

  In an instant, the screaming mower blade turned the ball of cats into meat confetti.

  Meanwhile, what remained of Kathy was still pulling her legless body toward me. The only mercy was that she was moving with all the speed and intensity of a wounded slug.

  I took advantage of the brief reprieve and yanked free a few Healing Cards, activating them with a few whispered words. Pent up mana rolled through me, rearranging my insides and knitting my skin back together in real time. Then I gained my feet with a grimace, lined up my next shot, and let loose with another Hydro Blast.

  My aim was true.

  Kathy wailed in agony but didn’t even attempt to avoid the jet. She just kept crawling straight into the spray, determined to murder me at all costs. The water beam tore her apart an inch at a time while stacks of Scorching Erosion built and built and built. Then, all at once, she burst into flames. Tongues of orange and red and yellow erupted from her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as her blood boiled and she blazed from the inside out.

  She was dead in a matter of seconds. Sometimes I felt bad about killing the things that called the Backrooms home, but not this time. As far as I was concerned, Kathy fully deserved every ounce of pain she’d experienced.

  That just left Kevin.

  The malformed Dweller was still putting up one helluva fight, even though he was handily outnumbered. He was under fifty-percent health, but just barely.

  Amazingly, the enraged Dweller was still trying to get to me. Thankfully, half a dozen blue, spectral shackles—courtesy of Temperance’s Puritanical Chains Relic—were binding him in place. One of his arms had transformed into an enormous tentacle as thick as my leg, which he currently had wrapped around Temperance, holding her in the air by the waist.

  Temp hacked furiously at the limb with her cleaver but couldn’t seem to drive it deep enough to cut all the way through. Every time her blade landed, the creature’s exceptional healing factor kicked in, patching him right up in seconds. With the addition of her smallpox ability, Temperance was doing lasting damage, but it was a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kinda situation.

  Croc was having just as little luck.

  The mimic, now in the form of a giant bear, split down the middle by a huge maw, was attacking Kevin’s back. Croc’s claws and teeth opened huge gashes, but the creature shrugged the blows off as though they were paper cuts.

  That was the real problem.

  These things seemingly felt no pain and they could take an obscene amount of physical damage without batting an eye. Although other types of magic seemed to work okay, my three companions mostly relied on beating shit to death with brute force. Jakob was having slightly better luck—thanks to his fiery-hot plasma shield which could sever limbs and cauterize wounds—but if we were going to survive down here, it was clear that my teammates were going to need a few upgrades.

  I could worry about that later, though. After we’d killed this son of a bitch.

  My two Comatose Clones, left over from my battle with Kathy, sprang to life with maddening fury and took off toward Kevin like linebackers, fresh off the snap. Without even a single moment of hesitation, one clone hurled himself right into the whirling lawnmower blade at the center of Kevin’s torso. It all happened so damned fast that there was nothing I could do about it, except stand there and watch as the mower turned the clone into Dan slurry.

  The second Dan shouldered his way past Jakob, latched onto Kevin’s leg like an unruly toddler, then promptly exploded in another shower of blood and bone fragments. The damage was minimal, but the force of the blast was enough to send Jakob flying backward, ass over teakettle.

  I rose into the air on strands of telekinetic power, circled right until I had a clear shot, then let loose with Hydro Blast, being careful not to accidentally hit Temp or Croc in the process. The beam or water sheered through Kevin’s tentacle arm, and Temperance tumbled to the ground with a wheeze. I plucked a trio of Balloon Menagerie spell cards from the deck in my tool belt, then sent all three flying straight toward the spinning blade.

  The cards triggered on contact, unleashing a dozen or more colorful animal balloons. The balloons bubbled outward, seemingly innocuous. Then the mower blade shredded the first few, setting off a powerful chain reaction which quickly detonated more and more balloons in turn. A massive fire ball roared upward, and the sheer force of the concussive blast rippled outward in a ring, sending Croc and Temp flying backward.

  The explosion was so loud it left my ears ringing and a purple afterimage temporarily stained across my retinas. I coughed a few times as I tried to blink away the blur. When the smoke finally cleared, there was a smoldering crater and body parts scattered across the lawn.

  Amazingly, Kevin was still, somehow, alive.

  He was little more than a torso and head, but it seemed that was enough for these freaks. Temperance, gained her feet with a glower, trudged over to the almost-corpse then looked down on the dying monster with cold contempt. Without a word, she drove her cleaver directly into Kevin’s skull. The creature let out a final gasping hiss—“stay off my lawn”—then his lawnmower blade stopped spinning as his HP bar finally, mercifully, hit zero.

  [Level Up! x 1]

  Research Achievement Unlocked!

  Like a Good Neighbor…

  Like a good neighbor… you burn it all down, purging the world of this suburban hellscape and the corrupt HOA that rules it with an iron fist. That’s how the saying goes, right? Right?! Today, you struck a blow against the establishment, turning a picturesque neighborhood into a scene from a Wes Craven flick. Good for you! The trail of viscera you left behind really ties the neighborhood together, though I doubt the powers that be will appreciate your, uh, “landscaping improvements.”

  Reward: 1 x Gold Outlaw Loot Token, 1 x HOA Citation (two more citations and very bad things will happen to you)

  I grimaced as I read over the new Research Achievement.

  The Gold Outlaw Loot Token was excellent, but the Citation was deeply troubling. It seemed the HOA adhered to a three-strikes-and-you’re-fucked policy and after our skirmish against these two, I wasn’t entirely optimistic about the outcome.

  Now that we had a rough idea of what we were dealing with, we’d be much better prepared for our next encounter, but there were a lot of Dwellers on this floor. We’d already seen hundreds of Kevins and Kathys. And who knew how many Timmys and Tammys were out there in the wild or what kind of powers they might have at their disposal. If they all mobilized and came after us at once, our only real option would be to run as fast as we could in the opposite direction.

  “That was a real shitshow,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “Did you know these things were more or less immune to physical attacks?” I asked Jakob.

  The Cendral shook his head.

  “As I said before,” Jakob replied softly, “I didn’t spend long on this floor, and I certainly didn’t fight any of the residents. No one does. That’s the rule if you want to survive. The best you can do is hope to live long enough to escape to an adjacent floor. When I made my trek down to twenty-five, two other people accompanied me. The first was a lovely woman named Adella Andersen Rodrick, who hailed from Sydney.

  “The second was a level twenty-five American, who everyone called “Two Cup” Dave. Two Cup Dave reminds me of you in some ways, Dan,” Jakob said, eyeing me thoughtfully. “He was a construction worker and a former Army Ranger. One of those no-nonsense types. Very tough. Never met an alcoholic beverage he didn’t like and never ran from a fight. Not even when he should have.”

  This time he paused and glanced at Temperance.

  “We were close to a stairwell when one of those roving bike gangs found us,” he finally finished, though I could tell he was troubled. As though there was more he wasn’t saying. “One of the things you must understand about this floor is that the residents don’t mind you being here. Not so long as you follow their rules—though, that can be a challenge in its own right. But…” he faltered again. “But they very much mind if you try to leave.”

  “Two Cup stayed behind to buy me and Adella enough time to make it down the stairwell. I told him to run. Pleaded with him. I was confident the Dwellers wouldn’t follow us, but Dave didn’t agree. He also wasn’t particularly worried. The man was overconfident to a fault. The Dwellers were higher level than him, but how dangerous could a group of children be, he reasoned? I caught a glimpse of those kids eating him alive. Tearing away pieces of skin while they drank his organs. Dave’s screams chased us down that stairwell and I still hear them in my nightmares sometimes.”

  He shook his head and pursed his lips into a thin line.

  “Well, that got real dark,” I said feeling sick to my stomach. Thanks to Croc, I’d become somewhat accustomed to hearing all about horrific Delver deaths, but there was something in Jakob’s eyes that made the story worse. Genuinely haunting. “You could’ve just said you didn’t know, dude.”

  Jakob offered me a small, sad smile. “Apologies. I didn’t really remember the incident until now. It all came flooding back quite suddenly. Almost as though the floor itself is trying to warn us not to leave. But the answer to your question is no. I wasn’t aware of how physically resilient these creatures are. In truth, what little I know about this level is mostly from stories that I’ve cobbled together from other Delvers. My firsthand experiences are limited and hard to recall.”

  Temperance, in a surprising moment of humanity, placed a hand on Jakob’s shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. It was such a small gesture, but it seemed to offer some measure of comfort to the Cendral.

  “Come on,” I said surveying the two mangled corpses splayed out on the hair covered lawn, “let’s loot what we can and get gone before more of these things show up.”