Discount Dan

The three of us immediately started to pick over the corpses, all with varying degrees of success. Unfortunately, the Silent-but-Deadly Assassin I’d fried with my Sterilization Field hadn’t left any Relics behind. It seemed my spell had obliterated the creature so thoroughly that not even its spatial core had survived the attack. The only trace of its existence was the putrid black blade, which had almost killed me.

All in all, I wasn’t too upset, though, since the blade was the real prize anyway.

Septic Shiv

Rare Artifact

Type: Bladed Weapon

Effect Duration: Until Cured

Cooldown: None. It’s a knife, dipshit.

The Septic Shiv is an uncommonly nasty piece of work that looks like it was forged in fires of Isengard. Except, in this case, Isengard is an Eastern-European hostel where organ smugglers harvest kidneys from unsuspecting backpackers.

As sharp as a dirty hypodermic needle, this thing was made for stabbin’! Every successful hit has a 15% chance to afflict the unlucky shmuck on the other end with Progressive Toxic Shock Syndrome. Trust me on this, it’s real bad. Maybe wash your hands after touching this thing? Just to be on the safe side.

Stage 1: Extreme headaches, high fever, and mild disorientation.

Stage 2: Full body aches and crippling muscle weakness. Athleticism and Toughness are reduced by 25%. Health and Stamina Regeneration are reduced by 50%.

Stage 3: Delirium, rapid onset anxiety disorder, and broadscale hallucinations. Grit and Perception are reduced by 25% and the user is 50% more susceptible to psionic attacks and psychic influences.

Stage 4: Organ failure and hemorrhagic fever causes bleeding from eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and rectum. Suffer 2 points of Bled Damage and 2 points of Putrefaction Damage per second until cured.

The rate of Stage Progression is based on the victim’s relative level and overall Toughness.

No fuss, plenty of muss. Hold the power of good ol’ fashioned biological warfare right in the palm of your hand!

I whistled through my teeth.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph the dagger was brutal. And to think I’d been a mere half hour away from total organ failure and hemorrhagic fever. I mean, what in the hell? I was pretty sure using this thing counted as a war crime against the Hague. Stage four dealt 4 points of damage per second, for a total of 240 points of damage per minute. I only had 77 total HP to my name. I would’ve lasted all of thirty seconds had the affliction finished metastasizing.

The only silver lining—if there was one at all—was that each stage of the illness took progressively longer before activating, though even that depended on several different factors.

The Artifact was diabolical and abhorrent, which is why I planned to immediately add it into my arsenal. I didn’t like having it used on me, but I’d be more than happy to use it against other people. Especially any of those shitheel Aspirants from the Skinless Court. Fuck all of those guys. Maybe if they started spontaneously bleeding from their rectums, they’d finally get the message and leave me the hell alone.

Interestingly, the summoned assassin Jakob had killed didn’t have a Septic Shive but did drop a single Uncommon-grade Relic called Gaseous Form. It was a similar, but worse version of Neural Slip Stream, and allowed the user to assume an intangible gaseous form for three seconds, rendering them immune from all normal weapons. The drawback was that it gave the user intense IBS so long as it was equipped. Still, a case of the runs seemed like a small price to pay for intangibility and damage immunity.

Since Jakob had made the kill, he hung on to the reward—though I couldn’t imagine he would keep it long term.

The Golem had three different Relics, two Uncommon, one Rare.

Since Croc and I had done the bulk of the heavy lifting, I ended up keeping the Rare Relic and one of the Uncommon-grade Relics, though I gave Jakob first pick. Only seemed far since he’d saved me from getting pancaked by a flying washing machine.

He wisely took the better—and less gross­—of the two Relics, Ball of Flies.

The Relic looked like one of those hanging fly strips and it was covered with tiny black bodies with iridescent wings. Although the conjured flies didn’t last long, they were gluttonous little bastards who ate living flesh and dealt a single point of slashing damage each before dropping dead. The spell cost forty-five Mana to cast and had a one-minute cooldown, which was a lot. But it also summoned one-hundred flies, which made it a terrifyingly powerful ranged weapon and well-worth the cost.

I idly wondered if it would be possible to merge Ball of Flies with Temperance’s Ball of Spiders Relic to form something greater than the sum of its parts. That seemed reasonable, though I wasn’t sure Temp would be open to the idea. She took an almost perverse delight in hurling spiders at people.

The other Uncommon-Grade Relic resembled a dirty plunger and was appropriately called Mudslide. It was also a powerful ranged attack that allowed the user to conjure a putrid geyser of sludge that dealt a combination of bludgeoning and disease damage. Aside from being objectively disgusting, in a lot of ways it was also shockingly similar to Pressure Washer. It had the same general range and dealt a similar level of base damage.

I had absolutely no desired whatsoever to add the rancid item to my spatial core—for what should’ve been fairly obvious reasons—but my gut told me that I might be able to forge it with some of the other Relics I had lying around and turn it into something truly formidable.

The most interesting Relic by far, however, was the last.

Collective Consciousness

Rare Relic – Level 1

Range: Line of Sight

Cost: 1 Mana/Minute

Buckle up buttercup, because it’s time for a hive-mind hootenanny!

Those fragmented golems you see wandering around? Well, they’re not just a pretty pile of rocks, or a hive of sentient man-shaped bees, nor even a meat-kaiju composed entirely of rotting corpses. Nope, they’re what we in the Biz like to call a Collective Consciousnesses—the ultimate mind-melding club, which utilizes a rudimentary mana-link to share their thoughts and feelings to become a big, bad unified force of nature.

Think of it as the metaphysical equivalent of a worker's union, but with more telepathy and less picketing.

With Collective Consciousness, you get to play puppet master by entering a powerful trance that allows you mentally merge with a summoned minion, seeing what they see, doing what they do, and maybe even figuring out why they never laugh at your jokes. The catch is, while you're out on your cerebral joyride, your body is in a catatonic state, just sitting there like a loaf of moldy bread. Word to the wise, be careful where you activate this bad boy…

This Relic Enables Mana Use.

After reading over the Relic description, I realized why my Sterilization Field had been so extremely effective against the golem. The creature wasn’t a single entity at all, but a large collective literally held together by pure mana. The Sterilization Field had effectively nullified the effects of Collective Consciousness, causing the creature to fall apart, unable to hold itself together any longer.

Although the Relic itself had some serious drawbacks, it would definitely be going into my private collection.

Although I could already control my Horrors with a limited form of telekinesis—directing them much the way I could my demolition screwdriver—this ability was far more potent. More visceral. It sounded like I’d be able to mentally slip into their bodies, piloting my minions from a distance like a horrific meat mech. It was just like being a Warg from Game of Thrones, but cooler because of chainsaw hands.

With that said, I still wasn’t completely gungho about adding it to my Spatial Core, for two major reasons.

First, the spell was Line of Sight only, which meant I needed to physically be able to see the meat-mech in question, and having my actual body slip into a coma in the middle of a battle seemed like a terrible idea. It was possible I could work out a short-term solution, but then there was the second problem to consider: I just didn’t have any more room in my spatial core.

In the early days, the thought of finding ten useful Relics seemed like an impossible goal, but now I was swimming in powerful Relics, and I just didn’t have enough slots for ’em all. Thanks to Runic Resonance Trap, I now had a clever workaround for some of my active spell-based abilities, but to properly employ an ability like Collective Consciousness, I’d need to have it equipped.

As I examined my newest prize, however, I realized there might be another potential solution. This new Relic had a strange sort of synergy with several of the other Relics I already had. Existential Dread, Mental Micromanagement, Unhinged Taxidermist, Form FleshTron, Go!, and Neural Slip Stream.

Instinctively, I knew I couldn’t just combine all of these into one super Relic. They were all wildly different from one another, yet somehow, they were related. They shared a similar purpose. Like puzzle pieces that belong together in a way I couldn’t quite understand. I stared at them for a long moment, brow furrowed, when something finally clicked, and a new prompt swam into view.

Resonant Mana Signature Detected!

Would you like to Forge Existential Dread (Rare, Fully-Tempered – Level 5), Mental Micromanagement (Uncommon – Level 2), Unhinged Taxidermist (Rare – Level 1), Form FleshTron, Go! (Rare – Level 1), Neural Slip Stream (Fabled, Fully-Tempered – Level 5), and Collective Consciousness (Rare – Level 1) into a new Emblem?*

Yes/No?

My mouth dropped open in disbelief, and I was tempted to select Yes out of pure, unadulterated excitement.

The only Emblem I’d ever seen was the Compass of the Catacomber, and it had come courtesy of the Flayed Monarch. It was also so insanely powerful that the Monarch was willing to go to war to get it back. It wasn’t hard to understand why.

Emblems were rare with a capital R.

Hell, they were more than rare. They were legends spoken about in whispers. They were myths like Bigfoot or the Chupacabra that only conspiracy theorists and rednecks believed in. Most Delvers never even got a glimpse of one and those that did usually didn’t live long enough to tell anyone else. Emblems were shrouded in mystery, but the one thing everyone agreed on was that they didn’t occur naturally. They were made.

Forged by combining a group of powerful Relics, which all served a related purpose.

I assumed there was some truth to that, based simply on the type of Relics contained within the Compass of the Catacomber. They all dealt with navigating, manipulating, or altering the Backrooms themselves in some fundamental way.

As I examined the highlighted Relics, I realized they also shared a unifying function: each Relic dealt with the mind in one capacity or another. Existential Dread allowed me to manipulate the minds of others. With Mental Micromanagement, I could telekinetically move things with my mind, while Unhinged Taxidermist, Form FleshTron, Go!, and Collective Consciousness touched on expanded states of mental awareness in one way or another. Hell, Neural Slip Stream literally let me become a creature of pure thought, at least for a short while.

Although Emblems didn’t enhance the individual Relics within, they offered one huge benefit. Emblems only took up a single Spatial Core slot. If I could forge these into an Emblem, it would allow me to equip additional Relics, which was the next best thing to a cheat code in this place. As excited as I was, however, I didn’t accept. Hovering just below the initial popup, like a footnote tacked on at the bottom of a textbook page, was a much smaller line of text.

* Run Researcher’s Codex Compatibility Analysis - Yes/No?

I mentally selected the Analysis option, and a new box replaced the first.

Researcher’s Codex Compatibility Analysis

WARNING! UNSTABLE EMBLEM CONFIGURATION DETECTED!

Based on historic data sets and extensive Forging models, the Codex Analytics Model predicts that attempting to combine the designated Relics into a unifying Emblem has a 12% chance of success. With such a low resonance compatibility, creating a predictive Forging model is not possible at this time. Combing these Relics will likely result in an unfavorable outcome, including the total destruction of all forged materials.

To increase the chances of success, consider performing the following action items:

Utilize Relics of Rare-Grade quality or higher to decreases potential progeneration decay.

Utilize fully-leveled Relics to decrease the likelihood of negative runic interactions.

Utilize Fully-Tempered Relics to drastically increase the chance of total resonance compatibility while further reducing undesirable iteration deviations.

Would you like to proceed with the Emblem forging process? Yes/No?

With a frown, I selected no and waved away the prompt while a thousand thoughts sprinted through my head.

Well shit. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Based on the new information provided by the Codex, it seemed I wouldn’t be forging an Emblem any time soon, but it did open a whole new realm of possibilities. Until now, I’d been selecting Relics based on pure survival utility without any broader strategy. Now, however, I had an active goal to work toward. Finding or forging fully-tempered Relics wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but thanks to the Codex I already had three—StainSlayer Maelstrom, Neural Slip Stream, and Existential Dread—which was far more than most Delvers. With this new insight, I could now actively search for anything that had either a mental or telekinetic component and make even more…

Still, as exciting as this was, I needed to pump the brakes. At least for now.

I couldn't afford to get distracted when I was so close to the goal line. I needed to deal with the Brownies so I could get back and finalize things with Ajax. That was the priority. That was the mission. And the mission always came first. Everything else would just have to wait. I deposited the new Relics into my storage space, then turned on one heel and picked my way over the debris-covered floor and back to the tidy and well-lit laundromat.