An Ape-alling Affair

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Splashing aqua regia on the handle worked perfectly, in the sense that it unpetrified the door, allowing it to be opened. Beyond was a downward stair, mirroring the one to the wine cellar. The comparison died out rather quickly, however, as where the wine cellar stair had ended, this one turned at a right angle and continued downwards.

Since they were anticipating a boss, John was taking point. Upon reaching the turn, he heard a click and felt a slight shift under his foot. A vial fell from the ceiling, and somehow John managed, in the quick glimpse as it passed his eye level, to recognize the contents as looking like alchemist’s fire.

That didn’t leave him time to do anything about it though, and a fraction of a second later his pants were on fire. A quick spray of winter’s breath had him dealing a bit of cold damage to himself, but putting the fire out and saving him from more damage in the end. He was just about to suggest Qhila took point since she was better at dealing with traps when something turned the next corner down the stair.

“Blasted interlopers!” the uplifted chimpanzee cursed at John and Qhila in the moment it took him to read the Observe result, then immediately turned around and rushed back down the stairs.

“Shit, a chase segment. Almost certainly trapped to hell and back too.”

“Then we need to slow down and proceed carefully.”

John shook his head. “No, there’ll definitely be a mechanic to punish doing that. I’m guessing the Boss will be spawning in more mutants or guzzling elixirs every second he beats us to wherever he’s going.”

“Bloody hell. Why does this thing insist on making us do insane things?!?” Qhila let out a roar of frustration that reminded John of her ancestral connection to dragons. Or would have, if he had somehow managed to forget despite her tail and scaled limbs. After venting, she rushed to the front. “Follow me as precisely as you can. If I call out to do something, don’t hesitate.”

They got about halfway down the next flight of stairs before Qhila called for him to duck. Half a second later, a jet of winter’s breath sprayed where John’s head had just been, instead painting the wall with a layer of frost. Being 2 for 2 on elemental damage traps, John switched his armored jacket for the lab coat he had gotten from the first Segment.

The mad dash through trap-filled hallways and stairways that followed was mostly a blur to John. He was dimly aware that he was once again physically outperforming his past self to a massive degree, but mostly his perception was narrowed down to the next 2-3 seconds worth of following Qhila’s footsteps and her voice.

What little mental bandwidth he had left over was taken up by marveling at Qhila for the umpteenth time. While the display of her trapping expertise while defending the inn had been more visceral and, frankly, scarier, this was in its own way even more impressive. Without breaking stride or slowing down as far as John could tell, she called out evasive actions, changed position in the hallway or bypassed most of the triggers. Out of somewhere past 30 traps, she seemed to have missed a grand total of 3.

Still, a lot of them were impossible to avoid triggering while going fast. While they successfully avoided the brunt of the damage, John got hit with splashback from several on top of the three direct hits. By the time they reached the end of it, John would’ve been down 109 HP if not for using one of the Boon granted healing potions. It had restored 99 but his HP Regen could take at most one more of those and a minor one, or he would hit negatives and suffer… some sort of nasty side effect. For people without Gamer’s Body, it was usually magical turbo cancer, according to Qhila.

Finally, the hallways opened up into a larger room. It was octagonal with a tall, domed ceiling and an utterly chaotic mess of pipes crisscrossing said ceiling. From every wall save the one they entered by, a gate with a setting-anachronistic conveyor belt protruded, with assorted, oversized alchemy equipment lining the walls otherwise. Still, the center of the room had a sizable clear area to fight in.

Two of the gates were open, and the conveyor belts were rolling, while they caught the uplifted primate in the process of opening a third gate by turning a crank. As soon as they entered, it let go of the crank with an, “Accursed meddlers,” and swiftly climbed the piping to the ceiling. The gate it had been opening slammed back closed as soon as it let go.

After a moment’s thought, during which the Boss didn’t react further, John turned towards Qhila. “Looks like it’ll start once we either attack it or step into the area between the conveyor belt endings. I’m guessing the Boss will do one of two strategies in the first phase. Option one: change between trying to drop on us to fight in melee and heading up in the rafters to either make ranged attacks or leave us to deal with whatever comes on the conveyor belts. Option two: first phase is entirely a ranged battle, absent the conveyor belt stuff. In that case, the second phase will probably be all melee.”

Qhila nodded and they downed their respective “Boss cocktails of elixirs. John was still holding off on the beast mutagen, as it had dawned on him that claws might get in the way of using the guns, squirt and shot alike.

As soon as they stepped past the conveyors, the uplifted chimpanzee curled itself into a ball-like shape to slip its feet into the lab coat. It withdrew four vials with its prehensile toes and immediately flung one at the duo, who evaded in opposite directions.

A pool of burning alchemist’s fire emerged where the vial hit the floor. John and Qhila returned fire with crossbow and squirt gun, but the mutant was already moving. It dodged and brachiated around in an erratic fashion with sudden changes of direction and speed that made predicting where to shoot to hit it impossible.

In short order, it sent another vial flying towards John. He dodged, avoiding a splashing of winter’s breath which instead left a patch of rime on the floor.

Moments later, Qhila evaded a vial of something that hissed and created a plume of greenish-yellow smoke. At the same time, the thud of wood falling onto stone pulled their attention towards one of the conveyor belts.

A fragile-looking, ramshackle box had been conveyed into the room. Between the box jostling on its own and the sound of aggravated scratching against its inside, it was obvious that the contents were alive and agitated.

Expecting it to be a ‘break the spawn point or you get adds’ type mechanic, John immediately strode over to do just that.

Before he got there, the Boss flung the last vial in his direction. Due to the lingering effects from the previous vials, his only option for dodging was into the patch of rime. Unfortunately, the frost left the bare stone slick and he tripped, a fraction of a second later getting hit with a few splashes of congealed lightning.

The alchemical weapon also hit the dingy crate. Illogically, this caused the crate to burst, spilling forth the trio of roostercats inside. A quick Observe revealed them to come preloaded with the potent pheromone frenzy, and at roughly 60% HP remaining.

Two of them went for John while the last pounced at Qhila. He caught the first, going for his face, out of the air and wrung its neck before tossing it aside. It had faded before hitting the ground.

The other scored a hit on his thigh and set up to dig in with the usual headlong aggression of frenzied mutants, making it relatively easy to just impale it on the Alchemfist’s spike.

“Watch out!” Qhila called out when John was scarcely up in a crouch, and he reacted by tossing himself as far away from his current position as he could without looking for whatever she was warning about first.

Good thing, that, because he only narrowly avoided the splashed acid from another vial flung by the Boss. It held three more, having evidently used the distraction of the mutants to grab another set. And just in case that wasn’t enough to deal with, another rickety crate was coming down the other active conveyor belt.

They dodged the remaining vials, combining to the same set of 4, but in a different order. They even managed to squeeze in a shot each at the uplifted ape, both of which failed on account of its erratic movements.

The crate once again hit the ground moments before the last vial was tossed. Instead of trying to target it, John decided to keep focused on the Boss. As soon as it curled up to ‘reload’, he fired at it in unison with Qhila. They both hit, but to John’s disappointment, the damage from his alchemist’s fire was reduced to a dismal cluster of 0s and 1s.

The mutant primate pulled out another quad of vials and started flinging, leading with winter’s breath this time. By unspoken agreement, John and Qhila stayed far enough away from the crate to keep it from getting hit as collateral.

It broke open on its own after the second vial, revealing a solitary vipermoth. That would have been exceptionally easy to deal with, if not for the frenzy overriding their attraction to flame.

Instead, they dodged it until the vials were done coming. Once given a moment to focus on it alone, Qhila caught it in the wing with her dagger as it swooped by, rendering it flightless. Once downed, no amount of frenzy was sufficient to make the creatures threatening.

Meanwhile, John hit the restocking Boss with a spray of winter’s breath. It did more damage than the alchemist’s fire had, but not by much. Clearly, the stained lab coat mentioned in its visual description hadn’t been just aesthetics.

Continuing in this manner seemed like it’d make for such slow going that they would tire out and start making mistakes before the end. Alternatively, he could whip out the shotgun. The roof should still be well within effective range, but it was still far enough away that he’d risk most of the pellets missing if he tried to shoot it while it was moving.

This made him effectively unable to burst it down in one go, but saving the burst option for the next phase did them no good if they never got there. And the next phase might have a hard counter to the shotgun like Pugsworth did, since this one seemed not to.

They got two cycles of vials without adds where John was free to focus on putting lead in the mutant ape when it went for more ammo itself. Then it was two with adds, two more without and repeat. The shotgun was substantially less devastating at range, but part of that was down to John only hitting with about half the pellets. He should probably find time to visit the gun range and hire an instructor to see if he could get a firearm Skill to show up.