MADMAN APOCALYPSE

I gave Bee a few more minutes to recoup her Mana, before having her airlift me to the entrance of the building hanging down below the enormous web. There was no door or anything, it was really just a hole in the sticky floor that was just about large enough for both of us to squeeze through.

“I’ll go first,” I said, clenching my fists in preparation.

“Save your big Pow Punch, but try to maximize your normal punches to build up its potential,” Panda coached.

Brock and I were both giddy with excitement for actually using this new skill, but it was a good idea to heed his advice. Not to mention, the more I built it up, the more potent it would become, which was only a good thing.

I took a deep breath, as though I was about to hop down into a dark bottomless lake. Then I jumped in.

WARNING!

Now entering the Broadcast Department’s ‘Castleburg Regional Headquarters’!

I landed on a brown scraggly carpet with my knees, finding myself within the lobby of a windowless building. Immediately ahead of me was a receptionist counter and behind it was an elevator. The walls had brownish-yellow wallpaper and the carpet covered every inch of floor. The ceiling looked like paper or cardboard, and there were a few dim lamps here-and-there.

With a yelp, Bee landed beside me.

“My Benefactor laid a trap for me!” I exclaimed, while getting to my feet.

“I don’t think they’re working with the Agencies,” Panda said, “But yeah, not telling you that they were leading you to the Regional Headquarters is like asking you to get jumped.”

“There’s a Receptionist here as well,” Bee remarked, and I looked at the counter where the top of a head was visible now that I was standing up. Whoever was manning the desk clearly knew about us.

“Please don’t kill me!” came the voice of the spider, interspersed with clicks.

“Stop hiding so we can see you,” I told her.

Bee was aiming the palm of her hand at the woman like this was a robbery.

“Don’t immediately shoot the Receptionist this time,” Panda told her.

“If she doesn’t try to call reinforcements, I won’t have to,” she said coldly.

The spider Receptionist uncurled from behind the counter and rose to her full height. Her body was covered in black fur, with two large mandibles clicking nervously in front of her mouth. Four of her appendages served as arms, while the other four were used as legs. From her behind protruded a large rounded abdomen.

“Tell us how to destroy this place,” I demanded.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Not if you answer the damn question.”

“There’s a shutdown button in the Boss’ office.”

“And where’s that.”

“On floor fourteen.”

“And that elevator will take us all the way to him?”

“No. You need a keycard from this floor to go to floor two, then a keycard from there to go to floor three, repeating with every floor.”

“That’s a wildly incompetent system,” Bee muttered, lowering her arm in disgust.

“Give us the keycard,” I told the spider.

“Are you going to kill me??”

I shared a glance with Bee, while Panda was shaking his head furiously.

“Let me ask you this: have you ever killed a human before?”

“I haven’t, I promise!” the Receptionist immediately replied.

“What does her Appraisal say?” I asked Bee.

She shared it with me.

Spoiler

“Shit,” Panda muttered.

“That’s the name of the guy who put a bounty on me when I killed the other Receptionist,” Bee explained.

“We won’t kill you,” I told the spider with the unpronounceable name. “Just give us the keycard.”

The Receptionist pulled out a bone-white wafer that had black text on it reading ‘Floor 1’.

I took it from her and inspected it.

Spoiler

“Tell me, the Boss on the top floor, what level is he?”

“He’s level 40,” she said, her nervous chittering making the words hard to understand.

I nodded to myself. “That should be doable if I build up enough power on my Pow.”

“Who holds the other keycards?” Bee asked.

“Floor Managers,” the Receptionist answered. “They have a red mark on their abdomen. Their levels go up with each floor. The first one is level 10.”

“See, she’s cooperating, you really don’t have to kill her,” Panda told us, basically pleading for us not to invoke the ire of her scary father.

“Do you have an alarm button somewhere?” I asked.

She nodded, but then quickly said, “I haven’t pressed it! I promise!”

“You might want to press it now,” I told her.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“If you leave the building, we won’t.”

“But I’ve never been outside.”

“Not our problem,” I said and moved towards the elevator.

Bee gave the Receptionist a scary look, before following after me.

I pressed the call button and, after a few seconds, a ding came, before the metal doors opened to reveal a completely normal elevator interior. There was a slot for the keycard wafer next to the floor select. Before inserting it, clicking the buttons did nothing, but after I slotted it in, the ‘Floor 2’ button lit up.

“What an annoying way of doing this.”

I looked over to the spider, who was staring back at us.

“Trigger the alarm and run,” I told her.

Terrified, she reached under the desk and flipped a switch or something.

Immediately, a loud siren began ringing out on this floor and, from the sounds of it, the ones above as well.

The Receptionist took off, running down the scraggly carpet until she hit the wall and just phased through as though it wasn’t there.

“I guess that’s how we’ll leave this place,” I muttered, then clicked the button for the second floor.

The elevator doors slid shut and a piano melody interspersed with random chittering filled the metal box as we began to go down instead of up.

“Get ready for carnage,” I told Bee.